Today’s Next Big Something is so wrapped in hype it’s tough to see what’s really going on … Anyone can recite the narrative. It goes like this: … By exchanging information, we grow closer as a community. By exchanging information, we become free. Blah, blah, blah. But what if … the crystal-ball narrative doesn’t turn out as planned? What if, a decade or so from now, we wake up to find that the digisphere has been overrun by swarms of inane mass marketeers… ? It has happened before … Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.
Predictor: Lappin, Todd
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Todd Lappin, a University of California-Berkeley journalism graduate student, writes: ”‘For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellowmen, to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events. An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile.’ [Who said it?] Mitch Kapor? Newt Gingrich? Al Gore? Alvin Toffler? Nope. Herbert Hoover, speaking in 1924 as the Secretary of Commerce. And the ‘great system’? Not the Internet. Nor the Infobahn. It was radio. Plain ol’ broadcast radio. In 1922, the ‘radio craze’ was taking the country by storm. Journalists wrote ecstatic articles describing the newest developments in wireless technology. Politicians hailed radio as the latest product of American entrepreneurial genius. The term ‘broadcasting’ – previously used by farmers to describe the ‘act or process of scattering seeds’ – was rapidly becoming a household word, complete with all its contemporary mass media connotations. Radio stations were popping up like dandelions across the land … Today’s Next Big Something is so wrapped in hype it’s tough to see what’s really going on. And as the hype solidifies into conventional wisdom, almost anyone can recite the narrative. It goes like this: The online revolution is happening now. The revolution will facilitate interaction through the digital exchange of information. By exchanging information, we grow closer as a community. By exchanging information, we become free. Blah, blah, blah. But what if conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the crystal-ball narrative doesn’t turn out as planned? What if, a decade or so from now, we wake up to find that the digisphere has been overrun by swarms of inane mass marketeers – people who believe that ‘interacting’ is something you do with a set-top box that provides only an endless stream of movies-on-demand, bargains overflowing from virtual shopping malls, and spiffy videogames? It has happened before. This isn’t the first time a new medium has come along, promising to radically transform the way we relate to one another. It isn’t even the first time a fellowship of amateur trailblazers has led the charge across the new media hinterland. Radio started out the same way. It was a truly interactive medium. It was user-dominated and user-controlled. But gradually, as the airwaves became popular, that precious interactivity was lost … We still don’t know who’s going to pay for a nationwide system of high-bandwidth pipes – never mind the question of how this new media will evolve as those household penetration numbers climb … ever higher … into double digits. Right now, we are present at the creation of yet another great system whose worth will depend on the use we make of it. Today, we have a second chance to ‘develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile,’ as Hoover put it in 1924. Perhaps radio wasn’t the right technology. But the Web and the Net may well be. Our job is to make sure that glorious potential doesn’t get stuffed into yet another tired, old media box.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Deja Vu All Over Again: Many-to-Many Communication. Citizen Control of a Remote Political Process. A New Culture and a New Economy. Sound Familiar? Such was the Hype for a Technological Revolution 75 Years Ago – Radio
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/dejavu_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney