The prediction, in brief:

The goal is referential integration. You’ve got all these people, and people are cultural – the individual has cultural software that he is running. As that culture is expressed electronically, you can integrate it into the Web. You can build a knowledge base that can draw on the experience of not just the individual or a limited group, but a whole country or planet … The Web is destined to become not only omnipresent, but also, in a sense, omniscient.

Predictor: Mallery, John

Prediction, in context:

In a 1994 article for Wired magazine about the Internet’s latest killer app, Mosaic, Gary Wolf quotes John Mallery, a researcher at MIT. Wolf writes:”At MIT, a researcher named John Mallery points out how primitive the Web’s links are today. They are fun, he agreed, but they are not smart. You can find information on the Web only by drifting through the links other users have created or by knowing the specific address of the document. But if documents and parts of documents were catalogued in more complicated ways, the system itself could build links. Browsing a magazine on the Web might automatically generate links to other magazines. Looking at an archive of photographs of flowers might automatically create links to a botanical database. ‘With these kinds of systems,’ says Mallery, ‘the goal is referential integration. You’ve got all these people, and people are cultural – the individual has cultural software that he is running. As that culture is expressed electronically, you can integrate it into the Web. You can build a knowledge base that can draw on the experience of not just the individual or a limited group, but a whole country or planet.’ In Mallery’s view, the Web is destined to become not only omnipresent, but also, in a sense, omniscient.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1994

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: General

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don’t Look Now, But Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe Are All Suddenly Obsolete – and Mosaic is Well on its Way to Becoming the World’s Standard Interface

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mosaic_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney