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Personalised media flows

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

One of the most famous media scholars of our era, Raymond Williams, came up with the concept of ‘flow’ in the mid 70′s to describe the sequence of content on broadcast television (shows, trailers, advertisments, previews, movies, whatever else the station programmer throws in). Williams thought that the sequence should be understood as a composite, a distinct emotional and psychological experience, a ‘single irresponsible flow of images and feelings’ (Williams 2003, p.92). ‘Flow’ has since become one of the most powerful critical concepts in film and television studies. I think the idea is still useful to us, but that we have entered an era of content personalization; there is not one, but literally millions of media flows, assembled or aggregated for each individual. Increasingly, digital content is produced on demand based on your current location; it is shaped by your social network and what they are recommending; it is predicted based on your personal Google search history or what you’ve been writing about in your webmail account. This personalized flow is substantially different from the early web, where content did not change based on the user’s purchasing history or social network; personalization was confined to choosing which links to follow or what to download.I think we need a term to describe the fact that we are all consuming different content, and that this content is increasingly being assembled and delivered to us based on our personal preferences/browsing history/social network.