Walter Bender
October 2002

In 1985, the MIT Media Laboratory opened its doors with a vision of convergence, the inevitable fusion of publishing, broadcasting, and computing. Seventeen years later, the term "convergence" has become a standard buzzword in many industries. Now that convergence has converged, the Media Lab has redoubled its research efforts to advance the relationship between humans and machines.

The News in the Future (NiF) Consortium had its first meeting in spring 1992. Its original purpose was to conduct basic and applied research to enhance the efficiency of production, distribution, and communications of news and advertising, while making these information forms relevant and accessible to consumers. There were three major thrusts of this research: understanding and representing news content, observation and modeling of individuals and communities, and the design of new presentation forms and interactions with content.

In our research on observation, personalization became a central concern: How can the delivery of information be targeted to a specific individual's needs and wants? As personalization became part of the news landscape, we shifted our emphasis to context. Needs and wants vary according to situations and circumstances, and the relevance of news is highly dependent on one's mood, physical location, experiences shared with others, and so on. In subsequent years, we became interested in community building, how consumers of news could become content producers, how journalism could become a model for collaboration and expression.

In fall 2000, we renamed NiF information: organized (i:o). We are utilizing digital information as a medium that can provide new ways for learning and expression once we develop techniques to tame and manage our current information overload. We are concerned about description, design, and debate:

(1) What are the processes involved in human understanding of news and information? How can machines be equipped with similar understandings to enhance their capacities as information organizers?

(2) How can we encourage the development of new forms of digital expression? How will a new, digital aesthetics change our relationship with data and information?

(3) How can we provide new ways for people to challenge and critique information, to learn from and with it? What sorts of tools and activities can we create to increase public discourse and debate?

These concerns are reflected in our technical foci:

(1) make the means of expression accessible without diminishing their quality or complexity;

(2) understand how we are limited in our decision-making capabilities and make tools that can assist us in decision-making tasks;

(3) have basic “common sense” understanding of our everyday world, and the ability to understand and react to the social and emotional contexts of the user; and

(4) leverage the social intelligence of communities of information creators and consumers to further the exchange and critique of ideas.