As switched video networks become extensively used for everyday purposes – shopping, banking, selecting movies, social contact, political assembly – they potentially will grab and keep much more detailed portraits of private lives than have ever been made before. And wearable devices – ones that continuously monitor your medical condition, for example, or perhaps the cybersex suits that some journalists have avidly imagined – may construct the most up-close and intimate of records.
Predictor: Mitchell, William J.
Prediction, in context:In his 1994 book “City of Bits,” MIT computer scientist William J. Mitchell writes: ”Orwell did not bother to think through the technical details, and [his] scheme would not really have worked – not with the primitive electronics that Orwell knew about, anyway. Where would Big Brother have put all the corresponding monitors on the receiving end? Where would he have found the labor force to watch them all? How would he have sifted through and collated all that information? What actually happened was far more subtle and insidious. Instead of one Big Brother, we got a vast swarm of Little Brothers. Every computer input device became a potential recorder of our actions. Every digital transaction potentially left fingerprints somewhere in cyberspace. Huge databases of personal information began to accumulate. And the collation problem was solved; efficient software could be written to collect fragments of information from multiple locations in cyberspace and put them together to form remarkably complete pictures of how we were conducting our lives. We entered the era of dataveillance … This is just the beginning; our lives have been leaving increasingly complete and detailed traces in cyberspace as two-way electronic communications devices have proliferated and diversified … There is more of this to come. As switched video networks become extensively used for everyday purposes – shopping, banking, selecting movies, social contact, political assembly – they potentially will grab and keep much more detailed portraits of private lives than have ever been made before. And wearable devices – ones that continuously monitor your medical condition, for example, or perhaps the cybersex suits that some journalists have avidly imagined – may construct the most up-close and intimate of records.”
Biography:William J. Mitchell was a professor and dean of architecture at MIT and the author of the predictive book “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (1994). He also taught at Harvard, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon and Cambridge Universities. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Privacy/Surveillance
Name of publication: City of Bits
Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter 6: Bit Biz
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-books/City_of_Bits/index.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney