For many Canadian families at Christmas this year, shiny new electronic devices took centre stage as much as that stuffed golden turkey. There were BlackBerrys, iPods, cellphones with text messaging and MP3 players, laptops, XBoxes and personal video recorders under many a tree -- gadgets, mostly linked to the Internet, heralding the great new age of interconnection.
They promise all the creations, news and thoughts of humanity at your fingertips -- making this generation the most plugged-in and informed in history.
But many observers are concerned this tech-savvy revolution could be leading just the opposite way. The filters and search devices used to make all this information manageable, they say, are isolating people into niches fashioned to their particular tastes and beliefs. Instead of going to common sources, whether newspapers or broadcast TV, to get the daily news, users are getting only the "daily me."
It's a phenomenon U.S. historian Christine Rosen has described as "egocasting."
"We are very pleased by having our prejudices, our beliefs, reaffirmed," Ms. Rosen says. "With these technologies -- starting with the remote control but much more dramatically now with digital video recorders -- we could filter out what we didn't want to hear. And we were happy about that."
With digital recorders that search television schedules and save only programs suiting the user's taste (best known under the U.S. brand name TiVo), for example, "watercooler" conversation about the latest episode of Desperate Housewives may become a thing of the past. Ms. Rosen, 32, began to contemplate egocasting when she noticed she would mention a show to her friends and they would say, "I don't have that 'TiVoed,' so I don't know what you're talking about."
In television, first there was broadcasting. Then "narrowcasting" emerged, with niche-fixated, small-audience specialty channels. As the arsenal of gadgets grows, Ms. Rosen says, the field shrinks right down to a single, indulged, audience member. A fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, she coined the term egocasting in a recent piece for The New Atlantis, a journal that looks at the intersection of technology and society.
Music downloading has brought a similar phenomenon: Teenagers can often be found sitting in clusters listening to individual iPods, each with their own particular playlist, rather than gathering around a stereo listening to the same albums.
But the biggest danger of fetishizing our own tastes may be to democratic civil society. In the current Canadian election, more and more people are getting their news via blogs and subscriptions to Web services that align with their own beliefs, so they hear fewer opposing viewpoints.
While it hasn't reached an extreme here, the hazards were evident in the 2004 U.S. election, in which Democrats and Republicans seemed to occupy wholly separate bubbles of data and opinion, while other Americans felt no relationship to politics at all.
Michael Bugeja, who has written about the socially isolating effects of me-first technologies in his book Interpersonal Divide, describes an experiment he did with his first-year Iowa State journalism class in the fall.
When the 53-year-old professor asked the aspiring American journalists what they thought of Judge John Roberts's then-recent nomination to the Supreme Court, none of them knew what he was talking about. Then he asked them to place all their gadgetry in front of them.
"Out came cellphones, personal computers, iPods. Gadgets I couldn't even identify that looked like peripherals or accessories," he says. He told them, "You bought or your parents or guardians bought you all of this stuff because they were concerned you would be disenfranchised from the information that is out there.
"Even though you have the power to access information and data all over the world, you do not know about current events, because you are doing something other than what we had hoped you would do in college."
When he said he knew they would remember at least one news story from the year before, the class doubted it. "I asked how many people here know about Ashlee Simpson lip-syncing on Saturday Night Live. They all did.
