The Coming Age of the Telepathic Online Store
How content discovery platforms will know everything about you

As writers publish more content on the web, readers will need improved tools for filtering out the words they lack time to consume. This post predicts our future tools for screening books and blogs.
Coping with the firehose of the internet
In 1997, a senior editor at The Economist named Frances Cairncross observed the communications revolution emerging from the web. Her book “The Death of Distance” predicted thirty trends that would shape global society, all driven by the fact that the internet would remove the barriers of communication that had isolated people throughout history. Twenty years later, many of her prophecies have proven prescient. One concerned our need to filter the deluge of information that would soon flood the internet:
Because people’s capacity to absorb new information will not increase, they will need filters to sift, process, and edit it (Cairncross, 1997, p. 7).
We see this trend in book publishing and blogging. My first post pointed out how people can rely on filtering software to sift through digital content. Amazon recommends new books to returning visitors, for example, and Medium suggests related blog posts to readers at the end of each article.
These content discovery platforms are a young technology, however. New information continues to engulf the web, and we mere humans still need better ways of navigating it. The next twenty years will see ever more sophisticated tools for showing us what we should read next. Mark my words: some will be downright scary.
Booksellers will read you like an open book
Advertisers on the web continue to find better ways to watch you. Quietly installing tracking software on your computer is so five years ago. After all, a person can delete cookies from their browser. Today, an ad company can identify you via the size of your screen or the charge level of your computer’s battery.
So imagine that Amazon knew your complete web browsing history for the past five years. Its algorithms could predict your reading interests with stunning accuracy using behavioral targeting. Visit a golfing website recently? A bookseller could promote a manual for improving your swing the next time you visit.
In this new age of omnipresent tracking, retailers know what we want to buy better than we do. Improved targeting technology over the next twenty years will reveal just how well a computer can understand us.
Cutting through the noise of the blogosphere
There are almost as many blogs in the world as there are people to read them. Tumblr alone boasts 345 million accounts. Just under 80 million posts appear on WordPress each month. Perhaps more than any other digital medium, people need help to navigate which blogs to read and which to avoid.
In other words, expect more blog discovery platforms over the next twenty years. They will use many of the same behavioral targeting techniques as their bookseller equivalents. You never realized you wanted to read reviews of Japanese cartoons, did you? The Medium landing page will in 2027 after it learns you watched an anime film on YouTube.
Your thoughts?
Agree with my predictions? Disagree? What do you think will happen to content filters over the next twenty years? How will the technology impact books and blogs? I would love to read your feedback.
Sources
Cairncross, F. (1997). The Death of Distance. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
