Maybe it’s because I’m not on-line, but it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses, and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn’t looking at you, he’s busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to mediation. And I don’t think I can break the membrane by going on-line.
Predictor: Birkerts, Sven
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 HarperÕs Magazine article, four experts on the impact of modern computing and telecommunications technology debate the effects of such technology on modern society. The article includes comments by Sven Birkerts, the author of “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,” published by Faber and Faber, an excerpt from which appeared in the May 1994 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Birkerts says: ”We gain a lot of our sense of our own reality and validity through being able to hear an echo, by getting our words back, by being mirrored. And community, in the old-world sense, was about being mirrored immediately. You know, you yell for Clem, and Clem yells back, and you understand the terms of your world. Now you type something to, say, Kiichi in Tokyo, and it comes back a few hours later. You’re being mirrored in another way. Maybe it’s because I’m not on-line, but it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape. People have drawn into their houses, and the shades are down. You go into a store and the clerk isn’t looking at you, he’s busy running bar codes. And you multiply that a thousandfold: mediation, mediation, mediation. I want an end to mediation. And I don’t think I can break the membrane by going on-line.Ó
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Relationships
Name of publication: Harper's Magazine
Title, headline, chapter name: What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 35 - 46
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne