Connecting Personalized Realities: Challenges and Opportunities in a Personalized Society

Enabled by advances in XR and AI, personalized services are increasingly affecting how individuals perceive, interact with, and navigate their realities. The resulting Personalized Realities (PR) may help people to interact more effectively with their surroundings, and allow more equitable access to information. However, PRs may also disconnect them from a collective understanding through isolated perceptions and perceptual filter bubbles. As democratic societies strive for social cohesion and shared knowledge and experiences, individual PRs may thus further add to existing social fragmentation. Yet, as PRs are framed as a concern that adapts experiences for a single user, they do not capture the full societal implications of a world where personalized mediation of reality is ubiquitous. In this paper, we therefore introduce the term Personalized Society (PSoc) to describe societies in which people predominantly access information and interact with others through a personalized mediation of reality. We discuss the duality of a PSoc, where personalization should be beneficial to the individual but at the same time connect people rather than isolate them. We identify key tensions arising in a PSoc and propose initial design considerations for fostering social cohesion alongside individual PRs, illustrating these through selected scenarios. Finally, we discuss the extent to which regulatory frameworks, such as the Digital Services Act, can be applied to protect individual and societal rights in a PSoc.