A highway makes sure you can’t even stop at a restaurant that might serve something local. So with the communications superhighway, I think. Five hundred channels sounds wonderful – but the 500 channels, and the electronic bulletin board, and the CD ROM Louvre, will still be showing the same narrow band of human experience, the only parts that can come across a screen. Vast amounts of information – the kind one gets from contact with other human beings or with the natural world or with live performance or with one’s own navel – remains beyond even the fiber-optified magicians.
Predictor: McKibben, Bill
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 New York Times article, writer George Johnson quotes Bill McKibben. Johnson writes: ”Someday, the visionaries tell us, we will be able to communicate with just about anybody by sending an electronic message; no matter where they are, the bundle of bits will find them … someday perhaps, but not yet … when we asked four writers to give us their visions of the information future … we reached Bill McKibben, whose book ‘The Age of Missing Information’ involved watching an entire day of television – every minute broadcast by a staggering 103 channels … [McKibben said:] ‘I’ve heard happy salutes to the coming ‘information superhighway.’ The phrase – beloved of the President, too – seems instructive to me. For what is a superhighway? It is fast, and this technology will surely be fast. But it is also flat, uninteresting, repetitive. A path provides you with immense amounts of information about a place – walking it, you feel the topography, the weather. You have time to look at what’s around you, to talk with anyone you meet. Even a back road – a blue highway – offers a lot of information, leaves you with some sense of the country you’ve driven through. But a highway makes sure you can’t even stop at a restaurant that might serve something local. So with the communications superhighway, I think. Five hundred channels sounds wonderful – but the 500 channels, and the electronic bulletin board, and the CD ROM Louvre, will still be showing the same narrow band of human experience, the only parts that can come across a screen. Vast amounts of information – the kind one gets from contact with other human beings or with the natural world or with live performance or with one’s own navel – remains beyond even the fiber-optified magicians.”
Date of prediction: October 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: New York Times
Title, headline, chapter name: We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=2a36a194c9a458e14d8de9643883255d&_docnum=4&wchp=dGLbVlb-lSlAl&_md5=75e1bac47fdc16cf2dea2332a2db34a9
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney