Abstract

In this commentary paper, we seek to argue that there exists a relatively common false idea about the level and type of personalization in the offerings of contemporary systems and services. In a nutshell, there is a tendency for researchers to think that there are many more personalized services than there really is, the general audience to think that they are offered personalized services when they really aren’t, and practitioners to have a mistaken idea of what really makes a service personalized. We call this Personalization Myopia. And yet in an era, which mashes up big data, data analytics, deep learning and persuasive systems, true personalization is a most promising approach for innovating and developing new types of systems and services, especially for supporting behavior change. Because of this prevalence of the Personalization Myopia, one should not judge the potential of personalization by considering only the current implementations or dominant way of thinking about these systems and services. This paper will help carry out research and design into personalized information systems.