Questão 747228

Text for items 21 through 30

1 What if television sets were equipped with knobs

that let viewers customize the shows they watch? If they

could adjust the sex content, for example, or regulate the

4 violence, or shift the political orientation to the left or right?

What if motion pictures were able to monitor the attention

level of audiences and modify their content accordingly,

7 lengthening some scenes while cutting others short if they

evoke yawns? What if the newspapers that reach subscribers’

home every morning could be edited with each particular

10 reader in mind? There are a lot of what-ifs, but none of these

is mere futuristic fantasy. All of them, in fact, are the goals

of research projects now under way at the Media Laboratory,

13 a dazzling new academic facility at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT). The Lab’s unique mission is

to transform today’s passive mass media, particularly TV,

16 into flexible technologies that can respond to individual

tastes.

Phillip Elmer-DeWitt. We the people. “Science

and Technology”. In:Time, 1997 (with adaptations).

According to the text above,

movies can make people yawn.