Elon University
The prediction, in brief:

Philosophical phenomenology of the sort championed by Martin Heidegger will make progress on this continent, as it believes that humans are not containers of perceptions but instead are always already out of themselves, into the world and toward the future; this is a philosophy that already characterizes itself explicitly as Žkstasis.

Predictor: Weinberger, David

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine, David Weinberger, president of Evident Marketing Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts, lays out a list of points of speculation about the future due to the changes networking will bring to the use of documents. Weinberger shares his introduction, and lists his fourth of five points here: ”In this Age of Deconstruction, the document is being taken apart every which way from a French Sunday. You’ve got documents that are paperless, paperless documents that are pageless, pageless documents that are queries, query documents that are agents. I prefer to think of documents as ecstatic. ƒkstasis. Standing outside of oneself. Beyond oneself. An ecstatic document is one whose value is not what lies within it but what it points to. A good Mosaic document is ecstatic. You read it not so much for what it says but for the links it shows you to other information. This change in documents is itself ecstatic – it points beyond itself to changes in our culture at large – for documents can condition our way of thinking and acting in vastly different ways … So, remembering that what makes a paradigm shift fundamental is that its results cannot be foreseen from the left side of the chasm, let’s speculate about what our culture might be in for: ”Phenomenology rules – Philosophical phenomenology of the sort championed by Martin Heidegger will make progress on this continent, as it believes that humans are not containers of perceptions but instead are always already out of themselves, into the world and toward the future; this is a philosophy that already characterizes itself explicitly as Žkstasis.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Community/Culture

Subtopic: General

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: The Ecstatic Document

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/weinberger.if_pr.html

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