The Future of Media

EPIC is an eight minute Flash film (English transcript), depicting a possible future for our media. It’s extrapolations of customized content aren’t far-fetched at all. Their hypothetical “Googlezon” that generates personalized news articles for each user is downright eerie.

Imagine a world where your Google News is combined with your personal preferences from Amazon. Imagine if you clicked a link for an article and it was generated on-the-fly based on various blogs and online papers that the software thinks you would be interested in. You don’t read the original article … you get used to reading the personalized summary. After a while, you forget that it’s not what actually happened anymore.

Is this our future? Take a look at your news today and ask yourself how you couldn’t have noticed how it’s already happened. The vision in EPIC (“Evolving Personalized Information Construct”) is scariest when one realizes that an unsophisticated version is already in place. The only difference is that news is tailored to the average user instead of to each individual user. EPIC is only an evolutionary step from the system we already have.