The prediction, in brief:

The concept of community is connected with assumptions of face-to-face interactions and leaves little room for electronic forms of conviviality. Internet associations will, I believe, claim more and more of our energy and commitment until the point when the refusal of the term community becomes silly. As you say, these commitments take away from other activities, though I suspect mostly from television watching. Nonetheless Internet associations are competitive with all forms of sociability.

Predictor: Poster, Mark

Prediction, in context:

In a 1994 e-mail internview with Erick Heroux, Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age,” gives his opinion on the concept of a virtual community through the use of various MOOs and MUDs:”There are surely new modes of assocation in the bulletin boards and MOOs and MUDs. I talk about these in my forthcoming book, ‘The Second Media Age.’ I look at these associations in relation to theories of community in the liberal-Marxist tradition, culminating in Habermas and in poststructuralists like Jean-Luc Nancy. The concept of community is connected with assumptions of face-to-face interactions and leaves little room for electronic forms of conviviality. Internet associations will, I believe, claim more and more of our energy and commitment until the point when the refusal of the term community becomes silly. As you say, these commitments take away from other activities, though I suspect mostly from television watching. Nonetheless Internet associations are competitive with all forms of sociability. We need to study the interweaving of electronic associations with older forms of community to see if the effects are complementary, antagonistic or non-relational.”

Biography:

Mark Poster wrote the paper “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)

Date of prediction: October 1, 1994

Topic of prediction: Community/Culture

Subtopic: Relationships

Name of publication: University of Oregon Web site

Title, headline, chapter name: Interview With Mark Poster: Community, New Media; Post-humanism

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/2-Poster.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas