Pretty soon, every household will be a centered unit that pulls all its elements together into one great communicating pipe organ. At the same time, there has to be a flattening of the human. It’s essential to the hive life, which challenges the old terms of what it means to form a life. As everything else in our society becomes streamlined, it becomes harder to resist the trend. Over the generations, people will have increasingly similar lives.
Predictor: Birkerts, Sven
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Harvey Blume interviews Sven Birkerts, author of “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Birkerts fears new technology is bringing us convenience in exchange for the loss of our souls. Following is a portion of the interview: ”Wired: You wrote: ‘By degrees – it is happening year by year, appliance by appliance – we are wiring ourselves to a gigantic hive.’ But human culture is so fantastically complicated it’s hard to imagine us living like social insects, electronic or not.” ”Birkerts: Pretty soon, every household will be a centered unit that pulls all its elements together into one great communicating pipe organ. At the same time, there has to be a flattening of the human. It’s essential to the hive life, which challenges the old terms of what it means to form a life. As everything else in our society becomes streamlined, it becomes harder to resist the trend. Over the generations, people will have increasingly similar lives.”
Biography:Sven Birkerts was the author of “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” Birkerts feared new technology was bringing us convenience in exchange for the loss of our souls. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Digital Refusnik: Sven Birkerts Believes that Technology is Leeching the Spiritual Out of Human Experience
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/refusnik_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney