Our saturation with information we don’t need, with noise that increasingly rattles us, will begin to pall … We will come ever more to resent the time it steals from our lives. Very few people any more want a real superhighway through their neighborhood, and perhaps it will someday be the same with megatube.
Predictor: McKibben, Bill
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 New York Times article, writer George Johnson quotes Bill McKibben. Johnson writes: ”Someday, the visionaries tell us, we will be able to communicate with just about anybody by sending an electronic message; no matter where they are, the bundle of bits will find them … someday perhaps, but not yet … when we asked four writers to give us their visions of the information future … we reached Bill McKibben, whose book ‘The Age of Missing Information’ involved watching an entire day of television – every minute broadcast by a staggering 103 channels … [McKibben said:] ‘I suspect that our saturation with information we don’t need, with noise that increasingly rattles us, will begin to pall, that we will come ever more to resent the time it steals from our lives. Very few people any more want a real superhighway through their neighborhood, and perhaps it will someday be the same with megatube.”
Date of prediction: October 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Information Overload
Name of publication: New York Times
Title, headline, chapter name: We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=2a36a194c9a458e14d8de9643883255d&_docnum=4&wchp=dGLbVlb-lSlAl&_md5=75e1bac47fdc16cf2dea2332a2db34a9
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney