The prediction, in brief:

The Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers.

Predictor: Poster, Mark

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 paper titled “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere,” Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age,” writes:”The Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers, though Heideggerians and some others might disagree, but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany. The problem is that modern perspectives tend to reduce the Internet to a hammer. In the grand narrative of modernity, the Internet is an efficient tool of communication, advancing the goals of its users who are understood as preconstituted instrumental identities. The Internet, I suppose, like Germany, is complex enough so that it may with some profit be viewed in part as a hammer. If I search the database functions of the Internet or if I send e-mail purely as a substitute for paper mail, then its effects may reasonably be seen to be those on the order of the hammer … But the aspects of the Internet I would like to underscore are those which instantiate new forms of interaction and which pose the question of new kinds of relations of power between participants.”

Biography:

Mark Poster wrote the paper “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks

Subtopic: General

Name of publication: Mark Poster's Web site

Title, headline, chapter name: CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas