1 NEW MEDIA’S POTENTIAL FOR PERSONALIZATION Helen Kennedy Information, Communication and Society, vol 11 no 3 2008 NEW MEDIA’S POTENTIAL FOR PERSONALISATION ABSTRACT Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. The growth of detailed and empirical work, which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question this rhetoric, has not stopped new media debate from continuing to be shaped, in part, by the language of the potential. This paper is concerned with one aspect of new media’s potential, personalisation. It focuses on new media’s proclaimed capacity to be adapted to meet the needs and desires of individual users. This is a trope that runs through much humanities and social sciences literature on new media and ICTs, yet despite recognition of the possibility of personalisation offered by networked media technologies, there is very little grounded, empirical work on this subject in these fields. In order to address this absence, this paper compares an attempt to personalise new media web content on a two-year research endeavour entitled Project @pple with the rhetoric about the potentiality for personalisation that new technologies offers. It aims to contribute to understandings of personalisation by detailing the issues that arise when attempting to implement it. The argument of the paper is that the difficulties encountered on Project @pple suggest that, in real-life situations, characterised as they are by constraints and complexities, it is not always a straightforward process for personalisation to cease to be potential and to become actual. KEYWORDS: new media, ICTs, personalisation, individualisation, variability, potential THE POTENTIAL FOR PERSONALIZATION IN NEW MEDIA Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. Academics, journalists, politicians and IT and creative industry workers alike continue to suggest that new multimedia technologies are the key to the information-driven twenty-first century (for example, Negroponte 1995 and Rushkoff 2002). Similarly, the early days of new media and cybercultural studies were characterised by sweeping and largely unsubstantiated claims about the potential of digital technologies, particularly in relation to the possibilities they opened up for community building (Rheingold 1993) and identity experimentation (Turkle 1996, Poster 1999, Kramarae 1999). Regan Shade neatly sums up the claims made for the Internet’s potential in the heady 1990s as follows: it would ‘create lifelong learning opportunities, improve job skills and career advancement, stimulate democratic participation, enhance cultural and creative opportunities, facilitate access and communications for individuals with disabilities, and streamline efficient markets’ (2005, p. 280). Such assertions have since been superseded by detailed and empirical work which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question some of these claims (for some examples, see Baym 1998 and Kendall 1999). In addition, other literature from science and technology studies, cultural studies and elsewhere has, for some time, critiqued the ways in which technologies are assumed to possess the inherent capacity to direct social change (for example MacKenzie and Wajcman eds 1985) or act as an imperative to adapt (Cuban 2001) and