Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today … The vast numbers of the illiterate had to learn their information, if at all, from painted or stained-glass pictures in churches, without access to the textual basis of the images. Today we call this television, tomorrow virtual reality. The sense of community and common goals among the “wired” was defined in opposition to a Great Unwired. The power of information technology is obvious; let us see that it does not, by excluding some from its communion, invent serfdom anew.
Predictor: Zorach, Rebecca E.
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Rebecca Zorach, a graduate student in medieval art history at the University of Chicago, writes: ”Despite its ultramodern, high-tech allure, digital culture is reflected – as in a glass darkly – in the monastery culture and manuscript aesthetics of the Middle Ages … On the cusp of a new aesthetic sensibility fueled by a groundswell of decentralized creativity, we might do well to look to the past for clues to our future. Imagine a medieval network of monasteries (and later, universities) as ‘nodes’ of learning, text copying, cultural creation, and exchange of a wide variety of material, all using the universal language of Latin. Among monasteries, news traveled faster and more efficiently (when not disrupted by invasions) than we might imagine. This system of monasteries was the original Internet, albeit at fractional baud. Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today. Most members of this privacy-poor society had only enough contact with the ‘Net’ to be periodically questioned in great detail about their private lives and given a good scare about what would happen if they did not behave. The vast numbers of the illiterate had to learn their information, if at all, from painted or stained-glass pictures in churches, without access to the textual basis of the images. Today we call this television, tomorrow virtual reality. The sense of community and common goals among the ‘wired’ was defined in opposition to a Great Unwired. The power of information technology is obvious; let us see that it does not, by excluding some from its communion, invent serfdom anew.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: New Mediaeval Aesthetic
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/mediaeval_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney