[New users’] desires and activities can easily distort the usage flows, arbitrarily saturating popular sites and services – most of which, it’s important to remember, are labor-of-love offerings made available for free, but with no guarantee of availability, or intended in some fuzzy fashion for “the Internet community.” But within the past few years, media attention has made the Internet appear a vast, often free super-resource, as opposed to a large, shared resource that users must replenish as well as consume. Moreover, much of the “neat stuff” on the net is somewhere between “proof of concept” and “neat hacks.” There is no way these can be readily available to teeming millions of new cybersurfers within the current provisioning of user services and resources.
Predictor: Dern, Daniel
Prediction, in context:The 1995 book “Public Access to the Internet,” edited by Brian Kahin and James Keller carries the chapter, “Meeting the Challenges of Business and End-User Communities on the Internet: What They Want, What they Need, What They’re Doing” by Daniel Dern, an Internet analyst and the author of “The Internet Guide for New Users” and “The Internet Business Handbook.” He writes: ”The new ‘public/consumer end-user’ ‘community’ represents what might be called ‘unaffiliated users’ – users accessing and using the Internet as individuals, rather than based on affiliation with a given educational, research, government, or commercial organization … Arguably, these users do not constitute a ‘community’ in the original Internet sense of the word, just a bunch of users, some of whom may now or later belong to one or more communities. More to the point, a great many of these are ‘unpurposed’ users – they’ve hopped on the Internet out of curiosity, to be (or attempt to be) ‘cool’ … They have not necessarily procured access for specific discussions, resources or goals. As a result, their desires and activities can easily distort the usage flows, arbitrarily saturating popular sites and services – most of which, it’s important to remember, are labor-of-love offerings made available for free, but with no guarantee of availability, or intended in some fuzzy fashion for ‘the Internet community.’ But within the past few years, media attention has made the Internet appear a vast, often free super-resource, as opposed to a large, shared resource that users must replenish as well as consume. Moreover, much of the ‘neat stuff’ on the net is somewhere between ‘proof of concept’ and ‘neat hacks.’ There is no way these can be readily available to teeming millions of new cybersurfers within the current provisioning of user services and resources.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Public Access to the Internet (book)
Title, headline, chapter name: Meeting the Challenges of Business and End-User Communities on the Internet: What They Want, What they Need, What They’re Doing
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Pages 208, 209
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne