Who will choose the new punctuation, the new layouts, the new indexing schemes? For good or ill, it will probably be the same kind of people who chose them after the time of Gutenberg – publishers, eager to sell … The standard-setters won’t necessarily be those with the deepest pockets. They’ll be the people who figure out how to organize, punctuate, and navigate the terabytes of information that are only milliseconds away.
Predictor: Arnett, Nick
Prediction, in context:In an online article he wrote for TidBITS: All the News that’s Fit to Byte in 1994, Nick Arnett states:”Who will choose the new punctuation, the new layouts, the new indexing schemes? For good or ill, it will probably be the same kind of people who chose them after the time of Gutenberg – publishers, eager to sell. Most publishers have seen digital networks primarily as an inexpensive distribution medium. We imagine that we can reap huge profits by saving the costs of printing, paper, and postage. On reflection, those seem not to be costs but falling barriers to entry. Publishers shouldn’t expect profits to rise; they should expect competition to heat up. It’s cheap – $2,500 plus $50 a month – to put a server on the Internet. The standard-setters won’t necessarily be those with the deepest pockets. They’ll be the people who figure out how to organize, punctuate, and navigate the terabytes of information that are only milliseconds away.”
Biography:Nick Arnett was president of Multimedia Computing Corp., the leading market research and consulting firm tracking multimedia technologies and markets, from 1988 through August of 1994. He later became the World-Wide Web product manager at Verity Inc. Earlier in the 1980s, he was a journalist with publications including InfoWorld and American City Business Journals. He was author of “The Internet and the Anti-net: Two Public Internetworks are Better than One.” (Entrepreneur/Business Leader.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: TidBits
Title, headline, chapter name: Mendicant Sysops in Cyberspace
Quote Type: Direct quote
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Beckett, Angela