Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word "egocasting" as "the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television, and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes." The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand.

As technology advances, McLaren and Roxburgh said, communication among diverse people risks becoming more narrow and fragmented — "from broadcast to 'narrowcast' to 'egocast.' "

The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. …

By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called "egocasting," the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste.