Technology and the news: what we don't know

It is the contention of the News in the Future research consortium at the MIT Media Laboratory that effective communication requires messages rich in description. These descriptions, when created with consideration of the context of both the individual and the community receiving them, can result in an engaging and useful message. The critical underlying technologies of information technology are those that give the user access and relevancy. These technologies include machine understanding of content, observation of context, and instructive mediation between message provider and message recipient. Just as critical as the engineering issues are questions of how information technology becomes: a part of the social fabric within communities; a catalyst for creating communities of interest; and a means of facilitating community introspection. The author poses questions of what is not known about the impact of technology on news. The discussion of what is not known is organized into five categories: cognition, context, communication, community, and commerce. In articulating questions, he briefly mentions some of the working systems being developed at MIT that hopefully will provide the insight necessary to answer these questions.