Another way to think of roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes but mouse potatoes! It’s not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it’s what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy that is less than 10 percent literate can survive in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general’s warning!
Predictor: Kay, Alan
Prediction, in context:A 1994 article in Wired magazine carried an excerpt of a speech delivered by Alan Kay, a computing pioneer and a fellow at Apple Computer, at the University of California at Los Angeles in the first quarter of 1994. Kay says: ”Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what. Another way to think of roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes but mouse potatoes! It’s not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it’s what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy that is less than 10 percent literate can survive in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general’s warning!”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: Democracy
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Infobahn is Not the Answer
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/infobahn.not_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney