Can the Internet culture survive? I don’t know. I do know that it has proved a remarkably hardy creature so far. I trust that with just a little bit of care and feeding it can carry on for a good while yet. If each Internet traveller who meets it on the road will do their bit to keep it going for a while longer we can perhaps enjoy its presence for a good while to come.
Predictor: Deutsch, Peter
Prediction, in context:Peter Deutsch included the following remarks in an essay that was printed in the March 1994 issue of Internet World. From 1991 to early 1993, Deutsch was the Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems, where he worked to define future corporate strategy. He was a co-recipient of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] Software System Award in 1993, and was active in ACM, IEEE, CPSR, and the League for Programming Freedom. He writes: ”Despite the fact that there is quite a lot of useful stuff out there, in reality the ‘Information Age’ promise of the Internet is still more potential than reality. At this point, content is best measured in quantity, not quality. No, if there is one thing that seems to captivate people more than anything else from the moment they first make contact with the Internet, it is that inexplicable sense of civic pride and community spirit that bonds each of us to every other user on the Net. When you find another Internaut at a traditional social function and end up swapping e-mail addresses … you’re affirming your membership in a semi-secret society that appears to be well on the way to changing the world … This sense of community is surely sustained by the ease with which such help is sought and given … Newcomers seem to rapidly and naturally find the appropriate mailing lists, newsgroups, archives or gopher servers that cater to their own particular needs and in the process they cluster together with others who share similar interests in various ‘virtual villages.’ That’s where the real excitment of the Internet is to be found, in joining and building the cyberspace frontier … When we start to see people really shutting down the volunteer services because of exploding demand, it might be time to start worrying (but the mere sighting of a posting which predicts their demise doesn’t count. I’ve been seeing those for years). When we start to see newly arrived commercial services flaunt local customs and get away with it, it might be time to start worrying (For example, if a commercial site were to send out a pile of unsolicited e-mail for their wares, and nobody bothers to flame them, then I’d be nervous). Most importantly, if you suddenly found yourself signing off the Internet early one day just so you can go find something just a bit more interesting to do, then I think it would be time to really start wondering where we all went wrong! So, can the Internet culture survive? I don’t know. I do know that it has proved a remarkably hardy creature so far. I trust that with just a little bit of care and feeding it can carry on for a good while yet. If each Internet traveller who meets it on the road will do their bit to keep it going for a while longer we can perhaps enjoy its presence for a good while to come.”
Date of prediction: March 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Virtual Communities
Name of publication: Internet World
Title, headline, chapter name: Preserving and Promoting the ‘Internet Culture’
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/doc/eegtti/eeg_268.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney