In the digital era, personalisation has emerged as a crucial factor in enhancing user experience and engagement. But what precisely is personalisation? It involves customising content, products, or services to cater to individuals’ unique preferences and needs. This level of personalisation surpasses simple targeting or customisation; it requires a profound understanding and anticipation of a user’s specific requirements.

While big tech companies have previously provided some targeting and customisation, true personalisation differs. It’s not about generating hundreds of thumbnails to encourage clicks. In hyper-personalisation and Dynamic Knowledge Rendering (DKR), no thumbnail is created until every aspect of personalisation is considered. Only then, in the context of that particular moment, is a single, unique thumbnail generated specifically for that user at that moment in time for that modality. This approach is about crafting experiences distinctly tailored to each user, making interactions more meaningful and effortless.

By leveraging technologies and strategies that focus on human needs/wants, personalisation can transform how we interact with digital systems, making them more intuitive, helpful and aligned with our real-world experiences. One such approach is Preference Prompts and the Preference Exchange Protocol (PEP). This protocol is designed to build and share a personalisation profile, enabling digital systems to understand and anticipate user needs more accurately while keeping the human in control.

Preference Prompts are a way to build a personalisation profile through natural language statements. These prompts can be factual information, context-based, or emotionally representative.

Derived Preference Prompts are prompts created by other digital systems, such as your music service provider; which understands your music preferences. Consequently, the service can derive prompts for you.

Note that Derived Preference Prompts can become Preference Prompts if presented and confirmed by the person the Preference Prompts will be personalising.

Shared Preference Prompts are prompts designed for shared experiences, such as a sports game or TV show.

Note that Shared Preference Prompts override Personal Preference Prompts, but when doing so that restriction is highlighted to the user.

If we live in a world that offers this level of hyper-personalisation where even the thumbnails of your podcasts are generated at the time you view them, what does that mean for shared experiences? We, as humans, are tribal beings; we like to do things with others and enjoy the dynamics of a collective memory. So, if we are all watching an episode of a new TV show and the next day we want to discuss the storyline or provide our perspective, how do we do that if we all watch something hyper-personalised to our preferences? We would lose our collective memory. We would no longer have the water cooler moments important to create, maintain and deliver human-to-human relationships.

So, how do we get all the benefits and upsides of hyper-personalisation whilst maintaining shared experiences in DKR?

Example – Football Match

Imagine yourself immersed in the excitement of a football match. You are witnessing in front of you the pitch, home to 22 players, two goals, a single ball, and the established rules of the game. Envision a cuboid encapsulating the pitch, defining a three-dimensional space within which the game unfolds. This vast space, filled with complexity, is teeming with trillions of atoms, each capable of being considered a distinct data point. The football, a spherical entity, occupies a specific portion of this space - let’s approximate it to encompass around 1 million of these atoms, hence a million data points. As the game progresses, the ball is kicked, tossed, and propelled through the air, tracing intricate paths across the three-dimensional expanse of the cuboid. This movement isn’t confined to the ball alone; it extends to the players manoeuvring across the field, the nets that quiver with each goal scored, and even the rain droplets that cascade down, altering the trajectory of a single blade of grass.

During a football match, our perception doesn’t dissect the countless atoms and data points in play; instead, we observe 22 players manoeuvring around a pitch, passing a ball until it finds its way into a goal. This simplification from a complex array of data to a comprehensible narrative of players and a ball is our innate way of converting data into meaningful information. This abstraction process elicits strong emotions among fans, dividing them into jubilation or despair depending on which side of the goal the ball lands. This is the essence of the excitement football brings.

However, the interpretation of events on the pitch, such as goals or tackles, can vary widely among the millions of spectators. This difference can stem from a more apparent viewing angle of an incident or personal biases influencing what individuals see, especially in contentious moments. As fans process what they’re watching, they filter data through their lenses of understanding, inevitably introducing bias into their perception of the game.

In Dynamic Knowledge Rendering (DKR) and hyper-personalisation, envisioning how a football match is experienced brings intriguing possibilities. Imagine observing the same game through vastly different, personalised lenses - one might see the traditional 22 players, while another could view the game as if the players were Pokémon characters. For these diverse experiences to converge into a communal narrative, specific universal rules or “Shared Preferences” must be established. These act as common ground, ensuring that, despite individual variations in perception, there are elements of the experience that remain consistent for everyone, such as recognising a goal.

Shared Preferences dictate the non-negotiable aspects of an experience to maintain its communal essence. For instance, in football, the spherical nature of the ball is fundamental; altering it to appear as a banana, even in a hyper-personalised view, detracts from the shared reality of the game. Thus, a Shared Preference might state that while the appearance of the ball can be uniquely rendered, it must retain its sphere shape to preserve the integrity of the game.

As I conclude to answer the question, “What are the effects of accelerating knowledge absorption through hyper-personalisation?” it’s worth noting that while the analogy of a football match might lend a light-hearted tone, the underlying principle of sustaining shared experiences amid hyper-personalisation is broadly applicable. This extends across the entire spectrum of human interaction, encompassing our roles within families, communities, and even the frameworks of governments and organisations.

The challenge and opportunity lie in embracing hyper-personalisation to maintain a delicate balance, ensuring that individual preferences enrich, rather than fragment, our collective social fabric.

Personalisation