Personalization is everywhere — and for a price

Everywhere, it seems to me, in both medicine and education, you cannot avoid the adjective, ‘personalised’. Read on. What follows is from an old post of mine, on a site that has died. I have therefore recycled it [pun intended].  All I remember is that it was from a THE article.

The author is a freelance ghostwriter, writing essays for students. As he points out, now that software can reveal what proportion of text has been lifted from other sources, a bespoke personalised essay (rather than a generic one) is the norm. Prerequisites for employment he says are having graduated from Oxbridge or a Russell group University. He writes— and this is where the first snippet is relevant: “I operate on the assumption that the student I’m working for will have little or no personal interaction with academic staff. This means that there is only a small likelihood that the lecturer who sets and marks the questions will be familiar with the student’s style of writing.”

Orwellian, I think. When the ministry of peace is the ministry of war, a personalised service tells you that not much is personal.