It’s embarrassing for me to admit this, as someone who writes a
column on the Web, but I almost never pay for online content. Till
yesterday I made an exception only for the Wall Street Journal. But
if it cost money to access the New York Times, I’m afraid I
would cough for that too, Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg
notwithstanding. The Times is still the paper of record,
even though the record is broken.
So when the Times sent me an e-mail this week
announcing a charge for its formerly free News
Tracker service, I didn’t hesitate long. Its customized alerts
have made me look smart more than once already. Without even
scanning the front page, let alone reading the articles, I can keep
up with the news in the areas I care about simply by checking my
e-mail. Twenty bucks a year is nothing for that kind of savings in
labor.
This is a plug not for the Times (plugging is the least
of its needs these days) but for the basic idea, which is probably
not original to www.nytimes.com, but which was news to me when I
found it there. Every site should offer this service, though if it
did, I’d soon find my in-box unmanageable and would need to get
more selective. (Do I really need an alert every time
Elisabeth Bumiller mentions Douglas Feith?) Having made my choices,
I’d then feel as well informed as John Poindexter.
Speaking of total information awareness, wouldn’t it be nice to
have a tracker service for the entire Internet: a continuously
crawling version of Google? The moment even the most obscure
blogger posted anything that fit my parameters — a mention of my
name, say, or a scanned photo of Monica Bellucci — Outlook Express
would chime and show me the link. (For all I know this application
already exists, in which case I’ll know about it minutes after this
piece gets posted. Thanks in advance to the readers who will tell
me.)
By extending this hypothetical service to e-mails (and
forgetting for a moment all about privacy), I could know almost
instantly about any electronic correspondence on any particular
topic. And of course the first topic I’d choose would be
myself.
Considering how much time people spend online now, this would
come awfully close to fulfilling a dream I had nearly 20 years ago,
when I first learned about Nexis. My dream was for a database
called Dixis, which would contain all the words ever spoken after
the inception of the database. You would be able to search it and
find out what your wife said to her sister in that long discussion
about your marriage after dinner last Christmas — a conversation
you didn’t even know about till you came across it on Dixis. Or you
could learn what your boss said to his assistant about your chances
of getting promoted.
The possibilities are endless, which is of course the problem.
Such knowledge would be more than anyone could manage to digest,
let alone use, no matter how refined the search engine. Fortunately
such a danger still seems remote, and far outweighed by the
manifold benefits of information technology. Which reminds me to
add “Terrorism Information Awareness” (as Admiral Poindexter’s
program has been modestly renamed) to my personal roster of News
Tracker topics.
