The creation of new worlds is at the heart of what all new communication technologies seem to be destined for. Part of that creative process involves narrative, part involves technology, and part involves social interaction … As CMC is rooted in narrative, it is clearly important to understand the travel stories users tell, implicit ones as well as explicit ones … Some say software will enable all users to contribute to, or create, an unlimited amount of narratives and texts.
Predictor: Jones, Steven G.
Prediction, in context:In his 1995 book “CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community,” Steve Jones writes: ”Indeed, the creation of new worlds is at the heart of what all new communication technologies seem to be destined for. Part of that creative process involves narrative, part involves technology, and part involves social interaction … As CMC is rooted in narrative, it is clearly important to understand the travel stories users tell, implicit ones as well as explicit ones … Some say software will enable all users to contribute to, or create, an unlimited amount of narratives and texts. The development of Mosaic software by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, for instance, links still images, video and audio to text-based documents and is not much more difficult to use than a fancy word processor. It is, though, only in its formative stages … Who are we when we are online? The question becomes even more important as new technologies are developed for creating ‘agents’ or ‘alters’ that roam the network for us when we are away from our terminals … The preeminent arena for realtime interaction on the Internet is the MUD, or Multi-User Dimension. In a MUD many users can interact using a text-based communication system and collaboratively created spaces … On another front, newsgroups do allow users time to consider messages and responses … new social formations may require new forms of inquiry, too. How will sociologists, ethnographers, communication scholars and anthropologists, for instance, grapple with issues related to studying electronic communities? … The interest is to understand the everyday life of the network and its citizens, to, as Carey puts it, engage in ‘a sociology of border crossing, of migration across the semipermeable membranes of social life that constituted…disorderly fronts…’ (1993, 179). In this case the fronts are on our computer screens, beckoning us to go from the ‘where’ of our own boundaries to a ‘who knows’ that, like any new frontier, is colonized first by our imagination and thought.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community
Title, headline, chapter name: Introduction
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://info.comm.uic.edu/jones/cybersoc.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney