Knowledge becomes not content but a talent, just as musical ability denotes what you can do, not what you contain.
Predictor: Weinberger, David
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine, David Weinberger, president of Evident Marketing Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts, lays out a list of points of speculation about the future due to the changes networking will bring to the use of documents. Weinberger shares his introduction, and lists his first of five points here: ”In this Age of Deconstruction, the document is being taken apart every which way from a French Sunday. You’ve got documents that are paperless, paperless documents that are pageless, pageless documents that are queries, query documents that are agents. I prefer to think of documents as ecstatic. kstasis. Standing outside of oneself. Beyond oneself. An ecstatic document is one whose value is not what lies within it but what it points to. A good Mosaic document is ecstatic. You read it not so much for what it says but for the links it shows you to other information. This change in documents is itself ecstatic – it points beyond itself to changes in our culture at large – for documents can condition our way of thinking and acting in vastly different ways. If you want to see how deeply the nature of documents affects us, consider one type of document – the book. Books not only give knowledge shape, they give knowledge permanence. We rest better knowing that our culture’s knowledge is preserved in books. Otherwise, the Alexandrian conflagration would have been nothing more than a warehouse fire. That’s how things were. Now documents are on the Net clothed in Mosaic. What’s different about documents isn’t that they have new types of content but that they point instead of speak. You use them as much as you read them. They have value because they can show you what else is of significance. Their expertise is less about having contents and more about knowing how to help you look. So, remembering that what makes a paradigm shift fundamental is that its results cannot be foreseen from the left side of the chasm, let’s speculate about what our culture might be in for: ”Knowledge changes – Knowledge becomes not content but a talent, just as musical ability denotes what you can do, not what you contain.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Ecstatic Document
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/weinberger.if_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney