It doesn’t matter whether you call the receiver a TV or a PC. What’s going to change is how those bits are delivered. They don’t have to be in real time. They can trickle in. They can come in bursts. They can come on demand. They can be pulled in by your machine because it looked at the headers and decided which programs it wanted. Gone will be the days of lock-step obedience when everyone stops eating at 8 o’clock to huddle around the screen and be there on time for the bits. People are going to look back on those days as truly ridiculous.
Predictor: Negroponte, Nicholas
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Thomas A. Bass interviews MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte on the 10th anniversary of the Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he heads up an effort that spends $25 million a year “engineering the merger of newspapers, television, learning and computers.” Bass asks “What have you changed your mind about in the last five years?” and he says Negroponte replies:”Open-architecture television. Five years ago, I thought TVs would be the home information appliance. I was wrong. For the past five years, people who build TV sets have been putting more and more computation into their TVs, and people who build personal computers have been putting more and more video into their personal computers. When these two industrial trends converge, there will be no distinction between the two. Don’t worry about the difference between the TV set and the PC. That’s not fundamental, because basically a TV set is a personal computer you look at from the sofa. Focus on the broadcasting side of it. In the future, we won’t be pushing bits at people like we’re doing today. It doesn’t matter whether you call the receiver a TV or a PC. What’s going to change is how those bits are delivered. They don’t have to be in real time. They can trickle in. They can come in bursts. They can come on demand. They can be pulled in by your machine because it looked at the headers and decided which programs it wanted. Gone will be the days of lock-step obedience when everyone stops eating at 8 o’clock to huddle around the screen and be there on time for the bits. People are going to look back on those days as truly ridiculous.”
Biography:Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and a popular speaker and writer about technologies of the future, wrote one of the 1990s’ best-selling books about the new future of communications, “Being Digital.” (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: TV/Films/Video
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Being Nicholas: Nicholas Negroponte is the Most Wired Man We Know (and That’s Saying Something)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/nicholas_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney