The costs of reaching and aggregating audiences should diminish sharply. There will be opportunities to produce and distribute low-budget entertainment for very small audiences and to identify and reach scattered audiences with the most specialized of interests and tastes. The infobahn may become a vast, global Broadway lined with thousands of virtual theaters. So the social superglue of necessary proximity between performers and audience is losing its old stickiness, and the traditional architectural types and social conventions (going to the theater, cheering for your local team in the ballpark) that we associate with performance are coming unstuck … Established distinctions between producers and consumers of entertainment … are breaking down. Soon, all the world will be an electronic stage.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes:”As high-bandwidth networks proliferate, and as network navigation software grows in sophistication, the costs of reaching and aggregating audiences should diminish sharply. There will be opportunities to produce and distribute low-budget entertainment for very small audiences and to identify and reach scattered audiences with the most specialized of interests and tastes. The infobahn may become a vast, global Broadway lined with thousands of virtual theaters. So the social superglue of necessary proximity between performers and audience is losing its old stickiness, and the traditional architectural types and social conventions (going to the theater, cheering for your local team in the ballpark) that we associate with performance are coming unstuck. Speech, music, scenes, and text can now be transmuted into bits and entered into the network almost anywhere. These bits can be decoded to create a performance wherever and whenever a spectator chooses to plug in. Established distinctions between producers and consumers of entertainment … are breaking down. Soon, all the world will be an electronic stage.”
Biography:William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: City of Bits
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 4: Recombinant Architecture
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney