I don’t know how much I agree with all the assertions in this article. Some of which are almost insulting. But no doubt, it provoked a response. I bet it will be thought provoking to you to.

…The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake?the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod?have created a world where the individual?s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.

… By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called ?egocasting,? the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one?s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.

…The remote control has influenced not only how we watch television?turning us into savvy consumers, postmodern artists, or herd-like grazers, depending on your perspective?but also what we watch on television. Television programmers reacted swiftly to the change in viewing behavior facilitated by the remote control. As Susan Tyler Eastman and Jeffrey Neal-Lunsford have found, producers soon realized the importance of “grabbing the viewers? attention at the beginning of a program,” with the goal of instilling “a sense of loyalty or commitment” as quickly as possible. The remote control made television programming a more Darwinian enterprise. Turnover rates for new programs are high, and there “is an even shorter time for new programs to establish an audience before cancellation.”

…The ability to ?time-shift? by recording a program to watch later was one of the main appeals of the VCR, which became inexpensive and popular in the 1980s. But recording one show while watching another often seemed to require a small army of video recording devices or a Ph.D. in computer programming; even then, the technology was limited. This changed with the advent of the digital video recorder (DVR), a technology that has given us even greater control over television viewing than the remote, but is also impossible to imagine without it.

…If our advertisements are any guide, we are using devices such as TiVo less as efficient, multi-tasking, modern assistants than as technological enablers that help us indulge in excesses of passive spectacle. TiVo does not free us to watch less TV by eliminating waste; it seduces us with more TV by making television a more perfectly self-centered experience.

…Even if you don?t believe that there is such a thing as “television addiction,” Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have compiled some startling statistics about our viewing habits: they found that “on average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day” to watching television, which is half of their total leisure time. We spend more time watching television than doing anything else but sleeping and working.

…The remote control and TiVo are not the only ultra-personalized technologies to captivate us in recent years. One of the earliest technologies of individualized entertainment was the Walkman, the portable radio and cassette player introduced by Sony in July 1979. Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Walkman recently, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer recalled his enthusiasm for the “mix tape” that the Walkman promoted:”Countless new soundtracks beckoned. I made running tapes, sunning tapes, sauntering tapes, strutting tapes.” He was no longer “a prisoner of Donna Summer or Molly Hatchet on the radio.” He created personal, portable soundtracks for life.

Not everyone was pleased by this new development, however, and some critics expressed concern that the Walkman would dramatically transform our experience of music for the worse. As music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, “No invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman.” By removing music from its context?in the performance hall or the private home?and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal.

..Like TiVo, control is the reason people give when asked why they love iPod. In a February 2004 interview with Wired News, Michael Bull, who teaches at the University of Sussex and writes extensively about portable music devices, argued, “People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction…. That can?t be understated?it gives them a lot of pleasure.” Like TiVo, this degree of control, once experienced, inspires great loyalty; the praise of iPod users echoes that of TiVo owners, both of whom often remark on how they can?t believe they ever lived without the devices. But because the iPod is a portable technology, just like the cell phone, it has an impact on social space that TiVo does not.

…What ties all these technologies together is the stroking of the ego. When cable television channels began to proliferate in the 1980s, a new type of broadcasting, called “narrowcasting,” emerged?with networks like MTV, CNN, and Court TV catering to specific interests. With the advent of TiVo and iPod, however, we have moved beyond narrowcasting into “egocasting”?a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don?t agree with or don?t enjoy. As sociologists Walker and Bellamy have noted, “media audiences are seen as frequently selecting material that confirms their beliefs, values, and attitudes, while rejecting media content that conflicts with these cognitions.” Technologies like TiVo and iPod enable unprecedented degrees of selective avoidance. The more control we can exercise over what we see and hear, the less prepared we are to be surprised. It is no coincidence that we impute God-like powers to our technologies of personalization (TiVo, iPod) that we would never impute to gate-keeping technologies. No one ever referred to Caller ID as “Jehovah?s Secretary.”

…TiVo, iPod, and other technologies of personalization are conditioning us to be the kind of consumers who are, as Joseph Wood Krutch warned long ago, “incapable of anything except habit and prejudice,” with our needs always preemptively satisfied. But it is worth asking how forceful we want this divining of our tastes to become.

The New Atlantis: The Age of Egocasting: Jan 2005 issue