Daily Me

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The Daily Me is a term coined by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte as a virtual daily newspaper customized for the individual tastes. Negroponte discusses it in his 1995 book, Being Digital. Fred Hapgood, in a 1995 article in Wired traces the concept and phrase back to Negroponte's thinking in the 1970s. Negroponte's idea surfaced at a time when the Internet was in its infancy and a few attempts to create a Daily Me did not take off. In 2005, Eduardo Hauser, an entrepreneur in Florida founded DailyMe, Inc. [1] and developed a proprietary, patent-pending application to create personalized newspapers and have them automatically delivered to each user's printer, fax or computer.

In Steven Johnson'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 personal tastes of a person on a given day will lead to too much positive feedback in that direction, and a person's choices for one day would permanently affect their viewings for the rest of their life. Ironically, while this text reaches publication in 2001, since then many customer-oriented websites such as Amazon.com and Half.com 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 customising and personalising 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, defined in an article in Salon by David Weinberger as "those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them."

Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, analyzes the implications of the Daily Me in his book, Republic.com.