Beyond the Web, interactive TV is really about personalizing television, watching what you want when you want it instead of having to settle for the motocross field hockey championships on ESPN2. Newspapers like this one could be next. E Ink of Cambridge, Mass., is trying to make newspapers that can be changed as easily as you can change the text on a computer screen. Finally you can eliminate all those stories about people dying in Africa and stuff. In one sense, personalization is good.
Time is short.
The Web is vast. Personalization can make the Web more manageable and effective. But there ought to be room for serendipity, too. The same could be said for a movie about the Titanic sinking, a Web site for buying and selling household junk or news about a Cuban boy caught in a cross-cultural family dispute. Serendipity is about running into those things and then finding out that you care.