Text for items 21 through 301 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 the4 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 particular10 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. “Scienceand Technology”. In:Time, 1997 (with adaptations).In the text above, “these” (l.10) refers to “what-ifs” (l.10).