From the pages of my notebooks - Ideas that got the chop.

This is nothing new, that media commentators have not noticed, but within the interactive technology world there is a lot of talk of tailoring user experiences in terms of RFID and personalised web browsing.

Those of us unfortunate enough to sit through it saw this illustrated in Minority Report when Tom Cruise, or whatever his character was called, walked into a shop which immediately recommended purchases based on his previous transactions. We are all familiar with Amazon doing this for us when we log on and our iGoogle showing us something that tallies with our ‘interests’. StumbleUpon aims to show us new things we may not be familiar with but these are within our chosen spheres of interest.

Why do we want these narrowed options tailored to make us sit comfortably in nice neatly labeled consumer boxes? Why should our past purchases or browsing determine what we are exposed to in the future?

These technologies can ultimately present us with fewer options and narrow our frames of reference. They have the potential to make us even lazier than we already are as our entire human experience is handed to us on a plate. They are the stuff of anomie-fuelled science fiction. So why are they being developed? They are the stuff of dreams for marketing and population control. I’m not very excited by the prospects for this

I wanted to do this but never got around to it. It’s one of the stupidest and most obvious ideas I ever put my name to. A poster with a tshirt shape and a tshirt with a poster shape. All nicely screenprinted and packaged together.