Perfect edit

How would you like to live life with all the bits you don't like blurred out?

ONE night in Berlin in 1960, the legendary Ella Fitzgerald tried singing Mack The Knife, saying, "We hope we remember all the lyrics." Although it started off well, by the time she reached the fourth verse, things didn't go so smoothly. She started making words up: "Oh, what's the next chorus/ To this song now/ This is the one now/ I don't know."

I'm a big fan of live music, in particular, jazz. There's something about the unpredictability of the performance that I enjoy – including the mistakes.

It seems so far removed from so much of popular entertainment these days, with the curse of "polished" production values and autotune (a machine that can change the pitch of a singer so that it is "automatically in tune" with the music). But what the content providers want us to consume doesn't always fulfil the consumer's appetite.

When DVDs first came out, they were sold by "regions". A distributor could say that he only wanted one region (say, America) to be able to watch a movie on DVD, and DVD players in another region (usually, Asia) couldn't play them. However, these providers are beginning to accept that that wasn't such a good idea (especially when region-free DVDs and players started to proliferate).

Times are slowly changing. Services such as Astro First and Unifi's HyppTV Video-on-Demand service mean that Malaysians are slowly catching up with the culture of on-demand viewing that services such as Hulu and Netflix have provided Americans for years. We are getting closer to an era when you can "watch what you want, when you want it". The obvious question that comes up is, "What next?" I think the answer is that we can add the phrase, "how you want it", to the sentence.

These days, technology makes it easier to customise content for individual users. It's already happening in online advertising.

Most ads that a user sees on the Internet take into account information such as geographical location, as well as other websites that the user has visited or terms he has searched for to build a profile. Two users may both visit the same website but see completely different ads.

This sort of personalisation is now creeping into entertainment. These include everything from providing multiple audio tracks in different languages for the same show, to sports events that allow the viewer to use a special "player cam" that allows him to focus on one specific player.

Imagine if this feature were extended to other shows. What if you could always focus the camera on your favourite actor or actress in a soap opera?

Or, perhaps you would like an online newspaper, where not only are all the ads customised especially for you, but so are the stories. This newspaper will demote stories that you don't find interesting, and replace them on the front page with those more to your liking.

And if you don't like how the article is written? Don't worry, a computer can adjust it to your style. A company called Narrative Science writes programmes that – you've guessed it – writes newspaper articles. Its website says that this technology "is able to transform data into stories that are indistinguishable from those authored by people". Perhaps we should add, "People whose styles and viewpoints you like."

So, there may be a time in the future when I may be out of a job, and this article – along with everything you've read, watched and listened to – will be passed through filters and tweaked to your preference before it finally gets to your eyes and ears. And by everything, I mean literally everything.

Google has recently unveiled Project Glass, a special set of spectacles that enables users to view information directly projected to the eyes. It's not inconceivable that these glasses will highlight in your real life, in real-time, things that should be of interest to you. Or blur out bits of your life that you'd rather ignore. Imagine being able to identify all the hawker stands that serve great food in a food court, while ignoring the pesky salesmen who are trying to sell you cheap bric-a-brac. It's the technological epitome of rose-tinted glasses: You accentuate the positive, and blank out the negative.

The irony is that, previously, authorities would limit what information we could get, and the Internet and technology were heralded as the keys to freedom and openness.

And now, we are heading towards a future where we willingly want to censor faults, both ours and others'. Why would you want perfection? Fitzgerald won two Grammy awards for her absent-minded performance in Berlin, for best album and best song.

A year later, she returned to Berlin and sang the same song again. Although generally it was deemed a more technically "correct" version (including the lyrics), it pales in comparison to her first, legendary, effort.

How do we discover the new if we close our senses to the new? It is the imperfect in us that makes us human, and I think we recognise that it is the flaws in the world around and within us that provoke the greatest emotions, be it sadness over our shortcomings, or joy over our strength to overcome them.

I do recognise that technology may one day be able to tweak musical recordings and insert "mistakes" that make a piece of music sound "live". And I, as an imperfect human, may not be able to tell the difference.

But I do know that artificial mistakes do not result in innovation. True genius is a result of finding the right path amid our many missteps, like how natural selection has led to the diversity we see in life today. Only by failing over and over again do we eventually, intentionally or otherwise, stumble onto greatness.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi's theory is that people need both to make of life's vagaries and contradictions.

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