Daily Me
Encyclopedia
The Daily Me is a term popularized by MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

 founder Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association ....

 to describe a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual's tastes. Negroponte discusses it in his 1995 book, Being Digital
Being Digital
Being Digital is a non-fiction book about digital technologies and their possible future by technology author Nicholas Negroponte. It was originally published in January 1995 by Vintage Publishing....

, referencing a project under way at the media lab, Fishwrap. Designed by Pascal Chesnais and Walter Bender and implemented by media lab students, the system allowed a greater deal of customization than commercially available systems in 1997.

Fred Hapgood, in a 1995 article in Wired credited the concept and phrase to Negroponte's thinking in the 1970s.

In 2005, Eduardo Hauser, an entrepreneur in Florida, founded DailyMe, Inc., and developed a proprietary, patent-pending application to create personalized newspapers and have them automatically delivered to each user's printer, fax machine, or computer.

In Steven Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author.-Education:Steven Johnson attended the prestigious St. Albans School as a youth. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, a part of Brown's modern culture and media department...

's book Emergence concerning emergent properties, Johnson addresses some of Negroponte's fears with homeostasis and feedback systems in mind. He argues that a newspaper tailored to the tastes of a person on a given day will lead to too much positive feedback
Positive feedback
Positive feedback is a process in which the effects of a small disturbance on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation. That is, A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A. In contrast, a system that responds to a perturbation in a way that reduces its effect is...

 in that direction, and people's choices for one day would permanently affect their viewings for the rest of their lives. Since the book's release, in 2001, many customer-oriented websites, such as Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 and Half.com
Half.com
Half.com is a subsidiary of eBay, in which sellers offer items at fixed prices, usually items that have a UPC, ISBN or other kind of SKU, rather than rare, old or collectible items...

, regularly utilize a customer's past views and purchases to determine what merchandise they believe will entice the customer's interest.

The term has also been associated with the phenomenon of individuals customizing and personalizing their news feeds, resulting in their being exposed only to content they are already inclined to agree with. The Daily Me can thus be a critical component of the "echo chamber" effect
Echo chamber (media)
The echo chamber effect refers to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an "enclosed" space.- How it works :...

, defined in an article in Salon
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...

 by David Weinberger
David Weinberger
David Weinberger is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto David Weinberger (born 1950 in New York) is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the...

 as "those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them."

Cass Sunstein
Cass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who currently is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration...

, a law professor at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, analyzes the implications of the Daily Me in his book Republic.com. Daily me and echo chambers
Echo chamber (media)
The echo chamber effect refers to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an "enclosed" space.- How it works :...

 have been suggested as one of the extremes of society induced by technology, the other being Tyranny of the majority
Tyranny of the majority
The phrase "tyranny of the majority" , used in discussing systems of democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority's interests so far above a dissenting individual's interest that the individual would be...

.

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