Once you know exactly what you want, you’ll be able to get it just that way. Computers will enable goods that today are mass-produced to be both mass-produced and custom made for particular customers. Customization will become an important way for a manufacturer to add value. Increasing numbers of products—from shoes to chairs, from newspapers and magazines to music albums—will be created on the spot to match the exact desires of a particular person. And often the item will cost no more than a mass-produced one would. In many product categories mass customization will replace mass production, just as a few generations ago mass production largely replaced made-to-order.
Before mass production, everything was made one piece at a time, using labor-intensive methods that hampered productivity and the standard of living. Until the first practical sewing machine was built, every shirt was handmade with needle and thread. The average person didn’t have many shirts, because they were expensive. In the 1860s, when mass-production techniques began to be used to make clothing, machines turned out large quantities of identical shirts, the prices dropped, and even laborers could afford to own a number of them.
Soon there will be computerized shirt-making machines that will obey a different set of instructions for every shirt. When you order you’ll indicate your measurements as well as your choices for fabric, fit, collar, and every other variable. The information will be communicated across the information highway to a manufacturing plant that will produce the garment for prompt delivery. Delivering goods ordered over the highway will become a big business. There will be amazing competition, and as volume becomes enormous, delivery will get very inexpensive and fast.
Levi Strauss & Co. is already experimenting with custom-made jeans for women. At a growing number of their outlets, customers pay about $10 extra to have jeans made to their exact specifications—any of 8,448 different combinations of hip, waist, inseam, and rise measurements and styles. The information is relayed from a PC in the store to a Levi’s factory in Tennessee, where the denim is cut by computer-driven machines, tagged with bar codes, and then washed and sewn. The completed jeans are sent back to the store where the order was placed, or shipped overnight directly to the customer.
It is conceivable that within a few years everyone will have measurements registered electronically so it will be easy to find out how well a ready-made item will fit, or to place a custom order. If you give friends and relatives access to this information, they will find it a lot easier to buy for you.
Customized information is a natural extension of the tailored consultation capabilities of the highway. Individuals who have achieved eminence in some field may publish their opinions, recommendations, or even worldview, in much the same way that successful investors publish newsletters. Arnold Palmer or Nancy Lopez might offer golfers the chance to read or look at whatever golf material they have found helpful. An editor who today works at The Economist might start his or her own service, and offer a digest of the news with links to text and video news accounts from a variety of sources. Someone using this review service, instead of paying 60 cents for a newspaper, might pay the expert a few cents a day for performing the middleman function of assembling the day’s news, and pay the publisher of each story selected a little bit too. The customer would decide how many articles he wanted to read and how much to spend. For your own daily dose of news, you might subscribe to several review services and let a software agent or a human one pick and choose from them to compile your completely customized
“newspaper.”
These subscription services, whether human or electronic, will gather information that conforms to a particular philosophy and set of interests. They will compete on the basis of their talents and reputations. Magazines fill a similar role today. Many are narrowly focused and serve as customized realities of a sort. A reader who is politically engaged knows that what he or she is reading in National Review is not “the news.” It is a bulletin from the world of conservative politics where little of what the reader believes is challenged. At the other end of the political scale, The Nation is a magazine that knows its readers’ liberal views and biases and sets out to confirm and massage them.
In the same ways that movie studios try to sell you their newest release by showing previews in theaters, print advertising, and various kinds of promotional activities, the providers of information will use all sorts of techniques to convince you to sample their wares. A lot of information will be local—from neighborhood schools, hospitals, merchants, and even pizza joints. Connecting a business to the highway won’t be expensive. Once the infrastructure is in place and a critical number of users adopt it, every business will want to reach out to its customers over the highway.
The potential for electronic efficiency is causing some people to worry that if they use the information highway to shop or get their news, they will miss out on the serendipity of running into a surprisingly interesting article in the newspapers or finding an unexpected treat at the mall. Of course, these “surprises” are hardly random. Newspapers are constructed by editors who know from experience a lot about their readers’ interests. Once in a while The New York Times publishes a front-page article about an advance in mathematics. The somewhat specialized information is presented with an angle that makes it interesting to a good number of readers, including some who didn’t think they cared about math. In the same way, buyers for stores think about what is new and might intrigue their type of customer. Stores fill their window displays with products they hope will catch those customers’ eyes and lure them inside.
There will be plenty of opportunities for calculated surprise on the information highway. From time to time your software agent will try to entice you to fill out a questionnaire indicating your tastes. The questionnaire will incorporate all sorts of images in an effort to draw subtle reactions out of you. Your agent will be able to make the process fun by giving you feedback on how you compare with the norm. That information will be used to create a profile of your tastes, which will guide the agent. As you use the system for reading news or shopping, an agent will also be able to add information to your profile. It will keep track of what you have indicated interest in, as well as what you “happened upon” and then pursued. The agent will use this information to help prepare various surprises to attract and hold your attention. Whenever you want something offbeat and appealing, it will be waiting for you. Needless to say, there will be lots of controversy and negotiation about who can get access to your profile information. It will be crucial that you have such access.
Why would you want to create such a profile? I certainly don’t want to reveal everything about myself, but it would be helpful if an agent knew I wanted to see any safety features the new model Lexus might have added. Or, it could alert me to the publication of a new book by Philip Roth, John Irving, Ernest J. Gaines, Donald Knuth, David Halberstam, or any of my other longtime favorite writers. I would also like to have it signal me when a new book appears on some topic that interests me: economics and technology, learning theories, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and biotechnology, to name a few. I was quite stimulated by a book called The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker, a professor at MIT, and I’d like to know about new books or articles on its ideas.