"Minority Report" and the Future of the News

As far as the technology in the movie, in ten years, the computer interface in Steven Spielberg’s film has become commonplace. Back then, watching Tom Cruise wave his hands around to zoom in/zoom out and otherwise manipulate data was all new. Now we see such things all day long on CNN. Even local weather reports now have lots of hand-waving at computer screens. And we also have multi-touch cell phone, iPads and more. And Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect gets us even closer. The computer stuff in Minority Report starts to look quaint, particularly with the heavy classical music background. 

 

Instead, it is Minority Report’s concept of “Precrime” that strikes a raw nerve. Computers barely mattered in everyday life when Dick wrote the story. When Spielberg made the movie, Google didn’t yet stand out and Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. Yet Minority Report featured a total information network for crime news. Tom Cruise / John Anderton’s police Precrime unit use cutting-edge technology to see and respond to violent crime before it happens, reducing the murder rate to zero. The movie features eerie media coverage of crimes that didn’t happen as opposed to covering them after the fact. 

 

Minority Report’s Precrime ultimately relies on three genetically engineered human psychics to report future news.  Substitute social media for Minority Report’s team of psychics and you have something like what is happening today. Over the next year or so, we will see the growing contention between and perhaps convergence of two major computing trends—search and social media.  Google does something like a billion searches a day, and Facebook has something like a half billion members. What we collectively search for affects what is the news. And all those tweets and facebook “likes” all over the traditional media sites also affect what is the news today. We can’t yet literally see what will happen an hour from now, but we can have a pretty good idea of what will the “news” an hour from now. In watching the psychics at work, and especially as one emerges with her own personality, you feel a bit the generalized, aggregated effect of social media. 

 

For communications staff and on-line advocacy organizers, these tools represent an opportunity. Key technologies are democratized--free services or open source tools. Almost any sized organization can put effort into search engine optimization or into trending messages on social media to be more part of the news. 

 

Yet in controlling the message, we play against a stacked deck where corporate communications staff have much more resources, even if they don’t have genetically engineered psychics. 

 

And the media empires offer these tools “free” in order to collect ever more information for their advertisers about us. That’s the other prescient element of Minority Report. Minority Report visualizes a world where we are surrounded by deeply personalized advertising. Corporate entities in the film have totalized databases of people and their histories. Computer systems scan your eyes, index them  into a database, and use to deliver the right advertising messaging. Watch the mall scene here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBaiKsYUdvg. The idea that corporations and the government have systems that know more about us than is realistically humanly possible is kind of scary.

 

This is the trajectory of Google, page visit tracking, and all the rest. We can read free services’ privacy policies (here’s the one for Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html). Most people don’t read them, and even if you do, do we really know how much privacy we really have? 

 

If we needed a reminder, we now know from Wikileaks, nothing today can be kept truly private, confidential. And even as everyone worried about airport scanning this fall, the real trend in domestic security is going to be more government information gathering, analysis and profiling.  I would say that what keeps Minority Report current is our wonder where will all this corporate and government information gathering will end and how much our own efforts to control the message can balance it. 

 

So, reflection leads to my resolution for 2011: do all we can to balance the oppressive, subliminally distorting, privacy-stealing control side of communication technology with greater efforts to keep usefully personalized tools working for the social good.