People are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us – by altering the way we perceive and communicate.
Predictor: Rheingold, Howard
Prediction, in context:Howard Rheingold, at the time the editor of The Whole Earth Review and a prolific member of the Well online community, became an advocate for virtual communities. In 1988, The Whole Earth Review published his article, “Virtual Communities.” Four years later, he said, “I reread it and realized that I had learned a few things, and that the world I was observing had changed. So I rewrote it.” The following excerpts are taken from this 1992 rewrite, which was published online by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Portions of it also appeared in “Globalizing Networks: Computers and International Communication,” edited by Linda Harasim and Jan Walls (MIT Press) and in the book “The Virtual Community,” by Rheingold (MIT Press). Rheingold writes: ”We’ll be able to transfer the Library of Congress from any point on the globe to any another point in seconds, upload and download full-motion digital video at will. But is that really what people are likely to do with all that bandwidth and computing power? Some of the answers have to come from the behavioral rather than the technological part of the system. How will people actually use the desktop supercomputers and multimedia telephones that the engineers tell us we’ll have in the near future? One possibility is that people are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC [computer-mediated communication] will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us – by altering the way we perceive and communicate.”
Biography:Howard Rheingold, one of the first writers to illuminate the ideals and foibles of virtual communities, published a webzine called Electric Minds and wrote “Virtual Reality,” “Smart Mobs” and “Virtual Community.” He also was the editor of Whole Earth Review and the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1992
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Virtual Communities
Name of publication: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Title, headline, chapter name: A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/doc/eegtti/eeg_260.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney