Many of our everyday tasks and pastimes will cease to attach themselves to particular spots and slots set aside for their performance – workplaces and working hours, theaters and performance times, home and your own time – and will henceforth be multiplexed and overlaid; we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place, so we will end up using that same place in many different ways. It will no longer be straightforward to distinguish between work time and “free” time or between the space of production and the space of consumption. Ambiguous and contested zones will surely emerge.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes:”Efficient delivery of bits to domestic space will, in addition, collapse many of the spatial and temporal separations of activities that we have long taken for granted. Many of our everyday tasks and pastimes will cease to attach themselves to particular spots and slots set aside for their performance – workplaces and working hours, theaters and performance times, home and your own time – and will henceforth be multiplexed and overlaid; we will find ourselves able to switch rapidly from one activity to the other while remaining in the same place, so we will end up using that same place in many different ways. It will no longer be straightforward to distinguish between work time and ‘free’ time or between the space of production and the space of consumption. Ambiguous and contested zones will surely emerge. Imagine, for example, that you are in your living room at eight o’clock in the evening. One window on your screen connects you to a database on which you are paid to work, another shows the news from CNN, and another puts you in a digital chat room. You switch your attention back and forth-mostly dealing with the database, but keeping an eye on the news and occasionally interjecting a comment into the interesting conversation that is unfolding in the chat room. Children come and go, making their usual demands, and you sometimes turn your attention to them. Are you at work or at play? Should you be charging your time (or some percentage of it) to your employer? If so, is your supervisor entitled to check up on you by monitoring the screen display? Are you occupying tax-deductible work space or nondeductible living space?”
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