We are on the brink of a great convergence – where the computer, the television, and the telephone will meet to create truly new communications products. Who knows how they’ll get along? Who knows what the result will be? What we do know is that the time for hype has passed. And the time has arrived for us to do the tough conceptual work of coming up with a new discipline, a new vocabulary, a new paradigm for what is emerging.
Predictor: Diller, Barry
Prediction, in context:A 1995 article for Wired magazine, carried the keynote address delivered by QVC CEO Barry Diller at the American Magazine Conference in Laguna Niguel, California. Diller also served as chair and CEO of Fox Inc. and worked as an executive at ABC and Paramount, and his words come from those experiences. Diller says: ”There used to be a cadence, a rhythm to things. It would take time not only for an event to get known, but for it to play out – for the consequences and the analysis and the understanding to incubate. Today it takes no time at all. Everything is available instantly. Everybody covers everything at once … The most relevant example of the rush to judgment involves those dreaded words ‘the information superhighway’: the 500-channel universe! Surfing the Internet. The dawn of a new era. Two trillion words juiced up to define, describe, trump up all the developments, the possibilities. And then the inevitable thud. Since it wasn’t going to take place in an hour and a half, the new conventional wisdom is that it’s overhyped, it’s not really that exciting, it’s off-track, delayed, not meeting expectations. Our impatience creates an impulse to spin a subject to unsustainable heights and then let it fall. We want everything before the fact; when it doesn’t materialize just like that, we decide the whole thing is an impossible dream … What’s the old saying? ‘A rumor goes around the world in the time it takes Truth to put its boots on.’ Today, Truth wouldn’t bother getting out of bed … When we become information savvy in a very superficial way, we get dragged along on the dumb current – scanning for patterns and trying to copy those that work. It gives a false sense of security, a dreamy delusion that success will be found by repeating the pattern again and again. Then – and this is true in the movies, in television, and probably in magazines – we become slaves to demographics, to market research, to focus groups. We produce what the numbers tell us to produce. We chase formulas for ratings or circulation. And gradually, in this dizzying chase, our senses lose feeling and our instincts dim, corroded with ‘safe’ action … We are on the brink of a great convergence – where the computer, the television, and the telephone will meet to create truly new communications products. Who knows how they’ll get along? Who knows what the result will be? What we do know is that the time for hype has passed. And the time has arrived for us to do the tough conceptual work of coming up with a new discipline, a new vocabulary, a new paradigm for what is emerging.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Don’t Repackage – Redefine! We Have to Resist Media Imperialism – the Tendency to Colonize, to Define New Technologies in Terms of the Old
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/diller_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney