The problem of giving consumers what they want

After about a year and a half of intermittent reading, I've finished the terrific Thinking, Fast and Slow. At the same time, I've been co-teaching a class on the future of television. I'm in the process of preparing a final lecture for the class, and I plan on drawing from Kahneman to talk about supply and demand in the world of TV (or whatever TV will become, i.e., some system for the distribution and consumption of video online).

The rhetoric of giving viewers what they want, when they want it is a big part of how new TV technologies and content are being sold. As we move from an environment of restricted choice to one of expanded choice, it would seem that consumers of media are more likely to get what they want. How could it be otherwise?

First, let's think about "what they want": how to define that, how to measure it. There have always been feedback mechanisms built into commercial systems, ways in which producers determine demand so as to know what and how much to supply. In the days of early radio and TV, producers heard from audiences via letters. Then came Nielsen, with ever-improving sampling techniques that more closely reflect what people are choosing, though the Nielsen system and the TV choice environment it worked with had limitations: there were only so many options from which to choose; there were some people (e.g., college students) who were difficult to track and so they didn't show up in Nielsen's picture of audience demand. What if we could eliminate these limitations? Wouldn't we have a more pure picture of audience demand to which we could suit our supply?

Technology improved, costs fell, and these trends helped eliminate flaws and overcome limitations in the feedback system. I'd like to raise two issues related to this improving image of audience demand in the TV marketplace. The first is that there are certain attributes of the TV system that aren't overcome by simply monitoring audience behavior more closely and/or removing restrictions on the viewers, giving them more "control" (which is the general progression of improvements in TV technology). The second is that a market in which supply and demand were more perfectly matched may not be desirable.

No matter how good audience behavior monitoring gets and no matter how cheap it is to implement, it will run up against privacy concerns of the audience. As choice expands, we may get a clearer picture of how people behave in any situation without any limitations, and its bound to reveal some ugly truths about individuals and groups behavior. As much as the audience wants to have its desires understood, it wants to be selective about what it shares about those desires, especially in a world in which desires are so closely associated with identity and potential.

Also, even if we could know exactly how people behaved in a choice environment with few restrictions, are we then permanently locked in to what they will desire? There's a wonderful scene in Mad Men where Don Draper reacts to the in-house psychologist who tells him what her focus group observation revealed about audience preference. Don's objection may be to the difference between what people say they want and how they behave, but I think the more fundamental objection is that people's future desires can't be predicted by their past desires. Advertisers and content producers are in the business of telling people what they will want, and as much as that sentiment rubs people the wrong way, it explains something about audience behavior no amount of data or market research can. Of course these are the words of a defensive ad exec asserting his value in an age where empiricism is creeping into an artistic realm. But I think there's some truth to it.

Don is wrong about not being able to predict future behavior from past behavior if he's talking about certain kinds of individual behavior. But the next trend, the next popular TV show, may not reveal itself no matter how hard you stare at people's current or past behavior. Psychologists may know that people pass on certain ideas to other people in certain ways under various circumstances, but the actual ideas they pass on can be set in motion by anyone with the budget to get in front of enough opinion leaders. Advertisers and show runners are just such people. They survive by developing new tastes, new markets for new stuff, and they can still do it in an expanded TV marketplace. So you have this force that will keep dropping ideas that are beyond whatever audiences currently want so as to do this, no matter how accurate the audience demand measurements get. 

Then there's a point made by Jonathan Franzen at a discussion during last year's New Yorker Festival. He discussed how the number of tweets or mentions on Twitter was now being used as a metric of how worthwhile an up-and-coming writer was to a publisher. That is, a publisher would sign a writer who had 100,000 followers or mentions on Twitter and not one who had 100, just because social media mentions and followers are pretty good indicators of present audience demand. This is another instance of the tightening of the feedback loop between creators and audiences. This could force writers to cater to the audience in ways that they did not before. But this idea makes Franzen and other content creators uncomfortable. Writers spend more time on self-promotion and homogenization of their work and less on developing their voices as creators. Better work is produced, so the thinking goes, when creators are not so beholden to current audience preferences (at least the ones that audiences are capable of articulating). The work is "better" not just from some elitist, subjective judgement of its worth but from a market standpoint: if an author or a show runner takes their cues from the Twittersphere, the product will be less pleasing to that very audience in the long run than if the author or show runner listened to their inner muses.

Finally, Kahneman's book brings to mind that the definition of what an individual wants (and the way that the individual ultimately acts based on their desires) depends on various characteristics of the choice environment, namely the timing of the choice, the number of choices, and the arrangement of available options. For example, whether or not there are thumbnails for similar videos on the side of the screen, as there are now on YouTube, may influence what people click on. Recommended videos on one's Netflix screen is another example, or songs that come up on Pandora. Users could've searched for whatever their hearts desired in the search box, and yet what they viewed was influenced by the arrangement of options, not solely the product of a pre-existing, internal set of preferences.

Two questions that popped into my head toward the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow related to Kahneman's conceptualization of two different kinds of thought processes: System 1 which is intuitive, automatic, fast, instinctual, emotional, and System 2 which is deliberative, slow, rational. Often times, these "systems" or ways of thinking reflect conflicting desires: System 1 wants to eat a burger while System 2 wants a salad. System 1 wants to watch an action flick while System 2 wants a documentary. So how we define consumer desire depends on whether we appeal to System 1 or 2. Here are my questions: What would a world look like that was entirely geared toward System 1, without restrictions? Are we now living in that world?

The inconsistency between what we say we want and how we act under various choice conditions is not infinitely large. Depending on what you compare it with, it could be considered insignificant. It doesn't make much sense to throw out the entire system of valuation because it is flawed. Better to detect the flaws and correct for the flaws in a way brings about positive individual and collective outcomes. The first step is one many people haven't taken: seeing the inconsistencies between what we say we want and what we choose in different circumstances. Then, think about the world or the life that we want and think about how to design a choice environment to bring those about. 

The relationship between supply and demand work in a marketplace of culture objects (e.g., TV shows) has a level of complexity that is not accounted for in the rhetoric that surrounds improving TV technologies such as Netflix and YouTube, both how they are sold and how they are celebrated by the press and by consumers. The relationship isn't infinitely complex, and work like Thinking, Fast and Slow lays out some rules for how people behave in certain choice environments.

Remote Controls

This moment keeps nagging at me, demanding that I think about it, write about it. First, I must acknowledgement the ways in which metaphors, or the likening of one moment in history to the present moment, can hinder understanding. By cherry-picking the ways in which the two moments are alike based on our preconceived notions of the fundamental nature of the present moment while ignoring all the ways that the two moments are not alike (or the ways in which the present moment is similar to another moment in history), we don't move any closer to understanding our current moment. But here I use the past moment not as a means of comparison or metaphor, but as a way of identifying how certain trends in media use got started. 

I'm speaking of the invention and popularization of the television remote control. The remote, along with the increase in the number of channels, marked a crucial lowering of the barrier to toggling among choice. It was possible to browse entertainment options before, but not quite as easy, and that shift toward easy browsing marked a change from comparing several options to one another to what I call entertainment foraging. Our experiences of using media in an impulsive manner and the attendant feelings of guilt grow out of this moment. The internet and mobile devices have merely extended the logic of the remote control to more moments and areas in our lives. Even when we stay on a single website like Facebook or Buzzfeed, we are often hunting or foraging for some unknown thing. We tend to think of media use as content consumption or connection with an other, as individual experiences: skyping with a friend, watching a video, spending time on Facebook. But I'm interested in the moments in between, the time spent looking for something, the time spent choosing, the proliferation of what you might call "choice points". It's the glue that holds together the other moments, but it takes up a lot of time, perhaps as much time as the moments themselves.

When I started thinking about media choice, I thought that change from the traditional media choice environment to the new media choice environment was the change from deliberative choice (System 2, in Kahneman's terms) to impulsive choice (System 1). But eventually I came to believe that even if the options are few, when its a matter of how you spend your leisure time, the stakes are very low, and so you make a quick choice. There isn't much at stake, so why deliberate? Even when the choices were few, we probably still chose impulsively or ritualistically, without much careful consideration. So perhaps our media choices were always usually impulsive, but they were impulsive with many borders or restrictions, different borders and restrictions than the ones we have now. The options from which we chose leisure media experiences were limited by bandwidth and shelf space. The times at which we chose such experiences were limited by synced schedules and clear demarcations between work and leisure times and places. Without the borders, without the restrictions, the options have changed. When the options change (and this is highly counter-intuitive, but supported by a ton of empirical evidence), our choice patterns change. Increasingly, our impulsive choices, collectively or individually, feedback into the system that generates the option menus. Our options, and our selections, are dictated by the impulsive self with less interference from the outside world. This doesn't bode well for our long term self, our abilities to achieve long term goals.

What can we do about it? What are we doing about it? There are new technologies that form a middle layer between media applications that offer us options and our impulsive choosing selves. I call these software applications, like Freedom or Self Control, choice prostheses. Are they effective? That depends. In some ways, use of choice prostheses resembles dieting, and most diets do not work in the long term. In other ways, they resemble choice architecture or nudges, which are more effective in changing behavior in the long term. This is the next step in my research on media choice: to better understand how choice prostheses work and how they might best be used to change our choices for the better. 

Our Digital Prostheses

For the past few years I've been thinking and writing about a group of technologies that, it occurs to me now, may best be described as choice prostheses. This includes commitment technologies that restrict one's choice (e.g., Freedom, Leechblock, WasteNoTime, StayFocusd, SelfControl, etc.) as well as something like TweetDeck which organizes options. Often, these technologies are in the form of browser extensions, but not always. They are all designed to alter your media use experience, your management of abundant options, in some way. They occupy a layer in between content producers and consumers. They are like lenses, filtering relevant options from irrelevant ones, or immediately gratifying ones from necessary-but-boring ones.

Prostheses developers and users are, in some sense, in an arms race with content producers and aggregators who seek to maximize the amount of attention paid their content. The producers get better and better at hooking us and keeping us in their walled gardens. The most successful websites are not narratives you disappear into, but shopping malls where everything is free. When we think about the experience of using these sites, we see the discrete bits of the experience: the posts in our feed, the stories, the GIFs, the images we click on. What we don't see is the glue that holds the experiences together: the repeated act of selecting from many options, of entertainment foraging. The appeal of such experiences is manifold. We respond to novelty, and immediately gratifying fare (that which scratches us right where we itch at that moment). But I think we also respond to that act of foraging. It is not enough to simply be presented with something new and immediately gratifying. We desire to choose it for ourselves. I'm interested in the outcomes of these moments of choice, the extent to which they are made unconsciously and how they are influenced by the number and type of options and the timing of the decision. But I'm also struck by how much of our leisure time is taken up by these miniature moments of choice. 

The prostheses are what we use when we look at our media use habits and don't like what we see. If our habits are the product of our intuitive System 1 thinking interacting with choice environments designed to maximize time spent on websites, prostheses are a way to change the outcome, to bring our behavior in line with our intentions. 

What You Search For Is All There Is

I'm still slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow, and every now and then, ideas from the book pop into my head when considering some type of media use. Today, I was thinking about searching for information online and how the bias of "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) might be applied to it (WYSFIATI). Essentially, people have trouble factoring in the effects of relevant information to which they don't have access but that still affects outcomes of interest. People assume, wrongly, that what they see (i.e., the information to which they have access) is all there is (i.e., all the information that is relevant to the outcome of interest).

The types and scope of information to which we had access was largely dictated by physical proximity, our social circles, books, newspapers, TV shows, movies. These sources gave us an incomplete picture of reality. There's nothing wrong with this per se, as long as the individual knows the extent to which and the way in which their information is incomplete. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman cites numerous experiments in which people are asked to make decisions based on information which they are told has a particular likelihood (e.g., 50%) of being true. But the more common flaw in decision making seems not to be the extent to which people trust a source, but the extent to which they assume that the sources are supplying them with complete relevant information.

Media users often employ some kind of skepticism toward the information with which they are presented. For example, viewers often discount what they see on Reality TV: they assume that the behavior of people on such shows is authentic in some sense but not in others.

But what about searching for information? You start off with a question about an upcoming decision. Sometimes, you find a relatively concrete, straightforward answer. Other times, you're searching for something harder to answer: whether or not to have children after 40, say, or whether or not to vaccinate your children, or whether or not to travel to the Middle East, or whether o not that lump on your shoulder is a tumor (in my case, thankfully, it was not).

Again, it's important to say that we never had perfect information to help us make these decisions. As a culture, we probably weren't hip to this at first, but in the recent past, and certainly once the internet came along, skepticism (or rather, cynicism) about mainstream media went, well, mainstream. It is true that our personal social networks, newspapers, or books were incomplete and biased sources of information. I think that the information we acquire through online search is incomplete and biased in different ways, but I wonder if the very act of searching increases our erroneous belief that we're getting complete, or near complete, information. The act of searching, of picking your own source, is likely to make you think that you're acting independently.

But search really magnifies certain biases in ways that mainstream media did not. Search results are, of course, not all that there is. They are based on what others click on (and a "click" is as much an indication of immediate curiosity as it is of the veracity of the information) and based on what we've clicked on in the past. So, confirmation bias probably influences search results. But the act of searching from among many (sometimes hundreds or even thousands, if you're especially diligent) sources makes you feel like a careful information consumer, someone who's not simply being spoon-fed information by those interested in making a profit.

Perhaps mainstream media was always interested in making a profit. They also were (and continue to be) interested in maintaining the status quo. It's been pointed out many times how this maintenance of the status quo was a bad thing, how it keeps populations from questioning despotic regimes, antiquated laws, bigotry, etc. But getting free of status-quo-enforcing sources of information has it's potential downsides. We may be disappearing down information rabbit holes based on shock value and pre-existing notions of how the world is.

But the point I wanted to make here relates to the certainty we have when we search that what we find is all there is. It seems to me to be counterproductive to refer to this as the illusion of agency or the illusion of choice, as one might be tempted to do. All decisions are made from incomplete information menus that are influenced by others who do not necessarily have our best interests in mind. But you can be more or less aware of the degree to which the information presented in those menus is complete and how it may be biased. The very act of searching makes it a bit harder to see these things clearly.

The object of media literacy is not to eliminate bias in one's media diet or finally obtain complete information, but to increase awareness of bias and incompleteness.

Post script: what I've really been describing is "What You Find Is All There Is" (WYFIATI). "What You Search For Is All There Is" really describes the sense that the world is defined by what you're curios about or interested in, which is a separate but related cognitive bias.

The hidden choice of establishing your media environment or repertoire

When we think about any choice we make – whether to eat that apple, move to Omaha, or avoid writing your dissertation and check the headlines instead – we typically think about it in two ways: in-the-moment decisions or general tendencies. But there’s an in-between step that’s missing from this picture, a decision or a series of decisions that preceded the one we’re examining: the decision to shape our media information environment. If characteristics of our environment affect the comparisons we make and the decisions we make (e.g. how many options are there, how easily accessible are they, what are their characteristics), then we must ask how we ended up in the choice environments in which we find ourselves. Increasingly, I think we’re partially responsible for them, though we tend to forget this quickly.

When we decide to text someone or check our email or go on Facebook or do some work, that decision is shaped by earlier decisions: the decision to have the internet in our house, the decision to keep our cell phone by our side. These decisions feel obvious because they bundle so many different kinds of options together. You cannot give up the distraction of Facebook because it comes bundled with access to the internet which you need in case a work-related email demands that you respond promptly or you will lose professional standing. Technologies that allow a user to block certain websites or applications from their own future access seem initially absurd, but really, they represent an act of un-bundling. Sometimes you want access to social media; other times, it is not in your best interest. Such prioritizing and self-restriction will become necessarily in a distraction-saturated media environment.

Today’s media environments are often characterized by the extent to which they are saturated by distractions: the vibrating cell phone, the regularly updated blogs waiting to be scanned, the pinging email inbox. We might consider the extent to which they are saturated by temptations, and how we might make a distinction between these two terms. All temptations surely are distracting, but are all distractions tempting? The term “distraction” is used to refer to messages that expect our particular, unique attention at a specific time (e.g. email correspondence, text message) and it is used to refer to messages or characteristics of the environment that are generally directed to us (as members of a larger group or as individuals) but are always there, not needing our attention that that moment. Facebook, ESPN, and that chocolate chocolate-chip muffin just sit there, waiting for my self-control to ebb, at which point I will succumb to temptations and indulge in a distraction.

When I give in to the temptations – Facebook, ESPN, muffin – I feel responsible for the choice, as is indicated by my feeling of guilt upon indulgence. But when I check my work email, read and respond to a work email, I feel no sense of responsibility. This is simply a condition of our collective environment! So, when we say we live in an era of distraction, we fold these two kinds of distractions together: the temptations (i.e. vices) and the expectations of immediate attention related to ostensibly virtuous activities like work. We do this in part because of the way media is sold: in bundles of virtue and vice.

And yet I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook that easily when it comes to work-related email or other virtuous online distractions. We have some agency in designing our media choice environment. We could’ve decided to put our cell phone on silent or not checked our email for 8 hours. One might complain that to do this would be to give up social and professional standing, and I think that if you just one day decided to do it, without giving the people you are in contact with any warning, then you would certainly give up social and professional standing. But if you simply gave the people around you the expectation that you are unreachable sometimes (either explicitly by saying that you will be “at work” during certain hours or implicitly by purposely delaying your responses to them), you could reduce the number of “necessary distractions” in your life. We have the tools and the ability to unbundle our lives but we have to acknowledge the self that can alter the media choice environment, the repertoire from which our future selves select an activity. That self has more and more say over what we end up doing with our time.

Living while distracted

As I walked hurriedly down South University on my way to catch a bus, fishing my headphones out of the jacket pocket as I went, I passed an older man who was standing still. He was holding his hands behind his back, idly gazing in the window of an ice cream shop while students whizzed by him on their way to class. His idleness struck me - what might he be thinking about all the people around him. In particular, what might he be thinking of me or any of the many students fiddling with Ipods and phones. The answer is: probably nothing (I tend to assume people are thinking about me when they're not, so egocentric am I), but it made for a productive jumping-off point for some musings on media distraction.

Media is an exceptional tool for distraction, perhaps the best that has ever existed. It is always available. It presents significant variety in terms of songs we can listen to, people we can text, shows we can watch, profiles we can check out. We can use it to distract ourselves (actively choosing the content or people we access) or we can be distracted by it (being confronted by people or content we didn't seek out). Usually, its some combination of the two: going to a site that links to some unexpectedly interesting other site, texting one person and getting a text from another, etc. All of it serves to take our minds off whatever we happened to be thinking about or feeling before. It distracts us.

Distraction has a bad reputation. First, it is other people's doing. We wouldn't choose to be distracted, but more and more, we are confronted with a distracting environment, cluttered with advertisements and solicitations. It prevents us from working efficiently, prevents us from thinking deeply or for sustained periods of time about problems which helps us to solve those problems (either personal or societal). It reduces us to attention-depleted pleasure junkies, incapable of reflection.

OK, fine. I'm not necessarily doubting this curmudgeonly way of thinking about our modern world, a view I probably falsely ascribed to the stationary man staring into the window of Stucchi's ice cream. But I think there is pleasure in distraction (or at least the potential reduction of pain). Its not something that advertisers forced upon us.

Jonah Lehrer cites the research of Walter Mischel on self-control, finding that the key to preventing yourself from indulging in something you desperately want but should not have is distraction (this is a gross oversimplification of it, but whatevs). Children were presented with a short-term reward - a marshmallow - and told that if they held out, they could receive a larger long-term reward (two marshmallows). Some kids were able to hold out, others were not. Those who were able to hold out, on average, went on to be more successful in life, having fewer behavioral problems, higher SAT scores, and better jobs.

What helped those children delay gratification wasn't that they desired the reward any less, but that they were skilled in the art of “strategic allocation of attention.” In Lerher's words, "instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the 'hot stimulus'—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from 'Sesame Street.' Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten." It isn't just that the children were distracted and that they resisted temptation b/c of this, but that they understood how their minds worked. They engaged in meta-cognition, and were able to make themselves think of something else to help them hold out for a long-term reward.

In other words, self-imposed distraction was good. It helped prevent the children from indulging in immediate gratification, helped them hold out for long-term rewards which, as it turns out, is a big part of succeeding at life. Could we then think of media as an aid in this process, a super-effective tool for self-distraction? When we are tempted to indulge in some immediate gratification that will hinder our abilities to succeed in the long run, if we pop on our ipod or distract ourselves with an episode of Glee or text a friend, all other things being equal, does that help prevent us from indulging?

There are other effects of this kind of use of media, ones that may hinder our abilities to achieve our long-term goals (lowered attention span, expecting positive and novel stimuli at the push of a button at all times, etc). But it is interesting to consider this particular incentive for using media, as a way of distracting ourselves from things that we should be distracting ourselves from, things that it would be in our best interest to forget about for a bit. If you distract yourself from working through an issue you have with, say, your father or your job, this isn't good. You should take time to reflect on those problems, think about how to resolve them in a way that benefits all parties. Otherwise, they will fester and grow bigger. But if you distract yourself from your immediate desires for the proverbial marshmallow, this may just help you hold out for long-term rewards. No amount of reflection on that desire will help you. its just rumination, perseveration. It helps no one.

How, then, to tell the difference between the two, between escapist distraction and beneficial distraction?

Uncertain entertainment

OK. I think I've got a dissertation topic: why we choose media.

I keep thinking that it has something to do with pleasure, but that we're not just hedonically motivated. Or that "pleasure," the end goal of hedonism, mutates and evolves in each of our lives so that to say that we are hedonically motivated tells us very little about why we choose certain experiences over others.

Let's take a concrete example. Today, I listened to a story from Stephen King's short story collection Just After Sunset. Why this story? Because I'd read/listen to other stories by that author and I'd enjoyed them immensely. Not only had I enjoyed them while I was listening to/reading them. I also would periodically recall emotions or ideas from the texts at various times, and that gave me pleasure and helped me cope w/ some rough patches. If we're to map out the decision making process that goes into choosing media, I think we need to take into account pleasure that comes well after actually experiencing the text. Hard to measure, but let's save the question of measurement for another time.

Anyway, based on past experience w/ other King stories, the low cost and availability of the story (free from my local library), my mood (more or less neutral, I just wanted to be transported while doing yard work, and if I got some insight into the human condition, so much the better), and the time available (I have lots, thanks to summer vacation). It was the wrong decision. At least for that one short story, I experienced pretty extreme displeasure. I experienced something that I'm sure many others have experienced: hating a media text but needing, masochistically, to finish the text, needing closure. Why was the text to unpleasurable? Because it conjured up unpleasant connections with my personal history. How could Stephen King know about that? He couldn't. But could I have known? That's an interesting question.

What do we know about a media experience before we spend time and money on it? When we re-watch movies, we know plenty, and sometimes, we experience great pleasure. Most times, we only have a rough idea of what to expect, based on author, genre, preview, or recommendation. We don't want to waste our time, but we want to be surprised. This requires a relinquishment or control, a trust in an author or authors that is paid for with our future attention. In this way, choosing to experience a media text is unlike so many other consumer decisions. I wouldn't want my car to surprise me. I wanted to know exactly what I was in for when I bought it. The same is true for every other consumer decision i can think of. The same isn't true for my experience with people. I wouldn't want to know utterly predictable people. Though they may bow to my every command, they would seem lifeless. So it is with media. We desire some unpredictability, some chance that what we experience may be undesirable.

I guess there's always the chance that one may be introduced to a new kind of pleasure, one that a consumer/user didn't even know they desired until they experienced it. The unknown experiences are fodder for our future desires and dislikes.

After choosing to listen to the King short story and hating it, I listened to a Radiolab podcast, and within the first 5 minutes, I experienced exactly what I wanted to experience. I was transported. I left my body. I also felt better about life and myself, if for a brief time (there, again, is the time issue. Is it better to experience a temporary boost in self-esteem than it is to get something embedded in your brain that will keep cropping up and putting things in perspective at later points in life? In a word, no. That's what makes great works of narrative so great. They stay in your head and pop up when you have various experiences. Hard to assess, but definitely a part of the worth of a mediated experience). I made a bad decision w/ the King, and a good decision w/ the Radiolab. What happened?

Part of it was a lack of information. If the King story came w/ a disclaimer that said, "Elliot Panek, this story will remind you of very specific instances in your life where you have failed, resulting in negative affect," well then I wouldn't have listened. That's a tall order for the media producer, but maybe, just maybe, some sort of information aggregator could keep track of certain things that were bound to trigger negative (or positive) affect for the user, screen the text for those things, and then give the user an idea of what he/she is in for. This would just be an extension, an elaboration of genre and its conventions. Totally doable given the pace of progress in IT.

Neither the media producer not the user wants too much of a chance of displeasure. They wouldn't want you to go elsewhere for media and you don't want to waste your time with displeasure. And yet some risk seems necessary. We seem to need to cede control, to some degree, at some times.

How curious it is that we spend time and money on something that might give us displeasure. Is this an acknowledgement of the quicksilver nature of human desire, or is this a failure of the media market to accurately inform the consumer whether or not the product is suited for a particular context? Obviously, its a large question, one hopefully fitting for a dissertation. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Celts play the Magic in game 1 of a playoff series. Sports is kind of the apotheosis of the uncertainly entertaining media experience. The Celts could win a quadruple overtime game, yielding a transcendent pleasure for me, or it could be a close loss for the Celts, yielding another evening of ennui. The choice is most certainly not mine.