The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an “Athens without slaves” or a “Jeffersonian democracy” in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.
Predictor: Cappio, James
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired, writer James Cappio says: ”If the trend in federal information policy that emerged in Vice President Al Gore’s January 1994 speech at the University of California at Los Angeles continues, the National Information Infrastructure (NII) will be less like the most revolutionary advance in technology since Gutenberg and more like – well, Prodigy. The vice president’s UCLA speech, like other Clinton administration information policy pronouncements, set forth five objectives for a federal information policy. None are concrete enough for anybody to oppose. But when government and industry announce an ’emerging national consensus’ in favor of apple pie, they are more likely to deliver a mouthful of Ritz crackers; why would the recipe offered by the vice president be an exception? The NII would scarcely be worth building if it offered no more than 500 channels of MTV, no matter how holographic, ambient, and jacked in to the gills. Its real payoff, its visionary promise, would be the possibility of an ‘Athens without slaves’ or a ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ in which people can provide information as easily as they consume it. A networked world offers the possibility of many-to-many communication, permitting widely separated individuals to bind themselves into collectives.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: Creating a Smaller World
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Bad Attitude: Business as Usual on the Infobahn
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/attitude.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Burnham, Jay