By decade’s end, we will look back at 1992 and wonder how a video of police beating a citizen could move Los Angeles to riot. The age of camcorder innocence will evaporate as teenage morphers routinely manipulate the most prosaic of images into vivid, convincing fictions. We will no longer trust our eyes when observing video-mediated reality. Text will emerge as a primary indicator of trustworthiness, and images will transit the Net as multimedia surrounded by a bodyguard of words, just as medieval scholars routinely added textual glosses in the margins of their tomes.
Predictor: Saffo, Paul
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article for Wired magazine, Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California, writes:”Video suffers from … ever-diminishing reliability in the face of ever more capable morphing technologies. By decade’s end, we will look back at 1992 and wonder how a video of police beating a citizen could move Los Angeles to riot. The age of camcorder innocence will evaporate as teenage morphers routinely manipulate the most prosaic of images into vivid, convincing fictions. We will no longer trust our eyes when observing video-mediated reality. Text will emerge as a primary indicator of trustworthiness, and images will transit the Net as multimedia surrounded by a bodyguard of words, just as medieval scholars routinely added textual glosses in the margins of their tomes. Of course words can be as false as images, but there is something to text that keeps our credulity at bay. Perhaps the intellectual labor required to decode words keeps us mentally alert, while visual stimuli encourage passivity. Studies conducted during the Gulf War hinted at such a possibility: Researchers found that citizens who read about the war’s events in daily publications had a far better grasp of the issues than avid real-time TV news junkies.”
Biography:Paul Saffo was the director of a decades-old research and forecasting foundation called the Institute for the Future, located in Menlo Park, Calif., in the 1990s. This Institute was a non-profit think tank that consulted for a large number of businesses and government entities, including telecommunications and consumer companies. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Hot New Medium: Text
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.02/1.2_saffo_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney