With improvements in telematics and interactive TV, soon each one of us could set up and print at home, using a TV remote control, his own essential daily newspaper, choosing from a myriad of fonts. The dailies might die - but not the publishers of dailies, who would sell information at slashed prices. But a homemade paper could say only what users are interested in, and would cut them off from a flow of potentially stimulating information, judgements, and alerts; it would rob them of the chance to pick up, on leafing through the rest of a conventional newspaper, unexpected or undesired news. We would have an elite of extremely well-informed users, who know where and when to look for news, and a mass of information subproletarians, content with knowing that a calf with two heads has been born in their district, and ignoring the rest of the world.
-Originally published, in Italian, by the Italian Senate, in Gli Incontri di studio a Palazzo Giustiniani: Stampa e mondo politico oggi. Translated by Alastair McEwen for Five Moral Pieces.
Eco mentions on the next page that Al Gore understands the future of the Internet.
