A premonition from 1983

Good morning, all. I intended to post this last week but forgot to grab its source, and since that source was a 1983 textbook on Mass Communication from my parents' house, I could not rip it from a website. It's amazing the world even turned before the internet.

Anyhow, the segment I wish to quote is from the section about newspapers of tomorrow. Its representation of our present media is uncannily accurate:

"It is only a matter of time before the newspaper industry, cognizant of readers' tendencies to read only what appeals to them, ceases distributing the same mass-oriented product to everyone. Futurists looking toward tomorrow's newspaper see homes equipped with receiving units (modified teletype machines similar to today's VDT's) that offer electronic scans of the news and hard-copy printouts. Users will exercise almost limitless control over content.

"By checking the daily news index, they will call up, in as much detail as it takes to satisfy them, those stories of greatest interest to them. In the process they will be free to overlook whatever disinterests them, thereby voluntarily missing out on entire chunks of important daily events and ideas. This disturbs many socially responsible editors who know that readers in pursuing their self-interests will find it easier to overlook substantial information and in the process become less responsible citizens.

"We could, as Merrill and Lowenstein suggest, build political, social and educational cocoons around ourselves, and our society could become divided into highly polarized, and probably, unempathetic, segments. Considering how far Knight-Ridder and Dow Jones have already come in their experimental electronic newspapers, that future may already be upon us."

Again, that was written in 1983 (the book is Introduction to Mass Communication, by Jay Black and Frederick C. Whitney: Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers in Iowa). I am sure Ed Murrow would have agreed (and he may have said something similar in his lifetime). It's a shame.