‘Have it your way’ is good for burgers, bad for society

We’re about 48 hours away from a presidential election pitting an incumbent who continues to insist that he’s a “compassionate conservative� against a challenger who insists that all he wants to do is “work for you.�

Both men, in other words, want to be president so they can help those less fortunate than themselves -- which, given that both are multimillionaires, means almost everyone else.

Whether one believes them or not -- and it’s difficult to believe Bush after all his help-the-rich tax cuts -- I applaud the sentiment. Indeed, I applaud anyone these days who even seems to think of anyone but himself.

Tom Wolfe coined the term “The Me Decade� to describe the rampant self-absorption of the 1970s. But thanks to the Internet, I’m terrified we’re now in a Me Century -- or even a Me Millennium, the most solipsistic period in our history.

One great advantage of the Internet, we’re constantly being told, is its potential for providing users with everything from news to e-mail to shopping to travel planning -- all tailor-made for the individual user.

“Have It Your Way� was the headline on a Time magazine story last year that went on to say: “The custom craze is on. Once a privilege exclusive to the Park Avenue class, customization has come to the hoi polloi courtesy of the Internet. A few clicks beget jeans, sneakers, shampoo, cars, candy, furniture, even vampire fangs made just for you and delivered to your door....�

These custom-designed services are supposed to save us the burdensome, time-consuming chore of sorting through large amounts of material and opportunities, the vast majority of which we don’t want.

OK. I’m as pressed for time as the next guy. But I worry that some filters we now use to achieve that efficiency increasingly isolate us from one another, deprive us of useful and/or interesting information and make us even narrower, more-specialized citizen-consumers than we already are.

“I know more and more about less and less every day,� a friend said recently, and I feel the same way.

You can tailor-make your online daily newspaper and have sports scores, stock market reports and a wide range of other information e-mailed directly to your computer, and you’ll see only the headlines, scores and those stock reports that interest you.

Great. Timesaving. Efficient. And I hate to sound like an apologist for the old-media folks who pay my salary. But one of the great ancillary benefits of the traditional daily newspaper is serendipity. You often come across something that you never thought would interest you but because it’s there, right next to something that does interest you, you read it and maybe you learn something you would never have thought to ask about.

I wish every provider of these customized news reports recognized the value of serendipity and breadth, as well as depth, of knowledge and force-fed users at least a few bits of unrequested, unrelated material that just might -- surprise -- prove to be of interest.

Failing that, I wish everyone who relies on these customized reports for most or all of their news and information would, when filling out the list of what they want sent to their computers, check a couple of boxes for subjects way outside their normal range of interests.

Factions and dysfunction

We live in an increasingly fragmented community -- an increasingly polarized society, as this year’s presidential campaign has amply, if sadly, demonstrated -- and online media services, as they now exist, just exacerbate that fragmentation and polarization.

We were once a nation knit together by Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson and Ann Landers. Now no newscaster has either the audience or the trust that Cronkite enjoyed, no late-night talk show host provides Carson’s universal comfort zone, and the market for advice columns has become so riven by demographics and specialization that I half expect to see one of Landers’ successors announcing that she’ll focus exclusively on the problems of left-handed lesbian orphans who suffer from insomnia and kleptomania.

More Americans get their news from television than from any other source, but the audience for the evening network news shows has plummeted 49% since 1980. The percentage of people who read newspapers has been in steep decline for two generations, and only 54% of Americans read a newspaper during the week.

Niche publications, niche television shows and niche advice columns have replaced the one-size-fits-all approach that was long the mantra of the mass media. And it figures to get worse as today’s younger people grow older.

Only a third of U.S. families with a head of household age 25 to 34 now buy a daily newspaper, compared with almost two-thirds in 1985. In the last 20 years, the percentage of newsweekly readers younger than 35 dwindled from 44% to 28%. The median audience age for the nightly network newscasts “ranges� from 56 for the “NBC Nightly News� to 61 for the “CBS Evening News�.

Young people are the Web-savvy generation, and young people have historically been more interested in themselves than in the world around them. They want what they want when they want it, and apart from a nursing mother, there has never been a better delivery system for instant gratification than the Internet.

I’m not a Luddite. I have high-speed Internet access on my computer at work, wireless DSL at home, and when I travel, I use my laptop to get sports scores and news bulletins.

But the more personalized the utopian Web world becomes, the more likely it is that we’ll see different stories and different ads, and we’ll communicate only with those who share our interests. We’ll be insulated from opposing viewpoints in ways that can only serve to undermine political dialogue and further polarize an already deeply divided red-state/blue-state nation.

As the New York Times reported last spring, Valdis Krebs, a social-network analyst in Cleveland, examined the sales of popular political books and found what the Times characterized as a “fiercely polarized� readership. “For the most part,� the Times said, “he found buyers of liberal books buy only other liberal books, while buyers of conservative books buy only other conservative books.�

Just look at the audience for Fox News and for talk radio -- and the popularity of recent polarizing books by Ann Coulter and Al Franken, not to mention “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry� and, of course, Michael Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.�

A communal loss

This is a time of rapidly burgeoning immigrant populations, each inevitably separated from the other -- and from the native-born population -- by language, culture, geography and the media they use. According to U.S. Census Bureau projections, minorities will account for more than a third of the U.S. population within six years -- and half of the population by midcentury. In such a multicultural society, more insulation and polarization are the last things we need.

Moreover, in Los Angeles -- perhaps the best example in the country of large but splintered immigrant communities -- people spend an enormous amount of time alone, driving their one-person time-and-space capsules from place to place. But at least they have to get out of their cars to go to the office, the bookstore, the grocery store. If you shop on the Web -- and work by telecommuting -- you don’t even have to leave your house.

Here, as elsewhere, you can even mail in an absentee ballot and not have to mingle with your neighbors at the polls. Not me, babe. I’m going to the polls Tuesday, even if it means standing in line. In this Webbed world, it may be our last, best sense of real community.

David Shaw can be reached at [email protected]. To read his previous “Media Mattersâ€� columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.