In debates about how the internet affects the health of media and democracy, the idea of The Daily Me usually is presented as a dystopian scenario. From a common public sphere guarded and produced by the mass media – Benedict Anderson wrote about the daily mass ceremony of newspaper reading – we are headed towards fragmentation, ego-worshipping and general disintegration of society. Ouch! Dystopia!
But instead of despairing, try looking at the different ways people piece it all together again. Thomas Frostberg notes a piece of advice from the ongoing Innovation Journalism conference in California: Red Herring’s editor Tom Murphy says that we are “in the middle of a transition – it will take 20-25 years for a new medium to mature, the public to get used to it and journalists to adapt to it.”
A great Daily Me service is Netvibes (belatedly discovered). Go ahead and play – dissect and assemble your 24-hour-Me from a variety of sources. In light of the coming fragmented dystopia, it’s interesting to note that so many new services are tracking what others are reading and viewing – ferociously searching for The Daily Them? Consider popurls, a meta-roof over del.icio.us, digg, Flickr and the like (via Stattin).
