If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won’t change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.
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 fifth 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 … 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:”Men stay the same – If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won’t change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.”
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