Really what they’re offering you is a mall. They want to give you an infomall where you pay for every bit of information you download, and you’ll download from a menu that some corporation has assembled … I have great hopes for the Internet, very little hope for commercial versions, and I profoundly hope that the Internet will continue to be the basis of this sort of growth.
Predictor: Gibson, William
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 interview in Stockholm, Sweden, conducted by Dan Josefsson for “Rapport,” Sweden’s most popular TV-news program, William Gibson, author of the term “cyberspace,” talks about the future of the Internet. When asked, “Is cyberspace a better place to be than this physical world?” he says: ”I think that the highway metaphor is particularly suspect. A highway is something you can go two ways on; it implies real traffic. Really what they’re offering you is a mall. They want to give you an infomall where you pay for every bit of information you download, and you’ll download from a menu that some corporation has assembled. It’s like they talk in the states about the ‘500-channel universe,’ and how we’re all are going to have so much cable, but what are they going to put on it? In Los Angeles you can have a hundred channels of cable on your television today, and you can flip through all of them, and there’s no content! It’s amazingly content-free. So I have great hopes for the Internet, very little hope for commercial versions, and I profoundly hope that the Internet will continue to be the basis of this sort of growth.”
Biography:William Gibson published the influential book “Neuromancer,” in which he coined the term “cyberspace,” in 1984. Through the early 1990s, he was asked to comment regularly on the coming age of the Internet despite the fact that he claimed to use it rarely, if ever. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: November 23, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Role of Govt./Industry
Name of publication: Interview
Title, headline, chapter name: I Don’t Even Have A Modem
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.josefsson.net/gibson/gibson2.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney