To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services … We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives? … [We should include] lay people in technology decision-making.
Predictor: Sclove, Richard
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 essay for Outlook section of The Washington Post, Richard Sclove and Jeffrey Scheuer write: ”It is easy to romanticize new technology. The popular arts glorified life on the highway. People read Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ watched ‘Route 66′ on television and recall the Merry Pranksters’ psychedelic bus-capades during the ’60s. In fusing alienation and rebellion with youthful exuberance, each of these foreshadows contemporary cyberpunk culture. Yet real-life experience on the interstate is mostly banal and uneventful. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wal-Mart look about the same wherever you exit … If the growth of the highways is revealing, so too is the opposition to freeway construction that emerged … Transportation engineers reeled at the specter of upright citizens rejecting their good works. Many current telecommunications engineers and true-believing entrepreneurs are no less convinced of the unalloyed beneficence of their art. The importance of the analogy between the information and asphalt highways lies in the political procedures that create them. What if a wider range of people, including non-car owners, had been involved in transportation planning all along? Considering the alternatives envisioned by critics … it seems likely we would have a smaller and different road system today … Three lessons for the construction of the information superhighway suggest themselves: ”- To help reduce adverse social impact, the federal government should mandate evaluated social trials of alternative electronic services … ”- We should conserve cultural space for face-to-face social engagement, traditional forms of community life, off-screen leisure activities and time spent in nature. How about a modest tax on electronic home shopping and consumer services, rebating the revenue to support compensatory, local community-building initiatives? ”- … [We should include] lay people in technology decision-making.
Biography:Richard Sclove was founder and an advisory board member of The Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization in Amherst, Mass., dedicated to making research, science and technology responsive to social and environmental concerns. He is also the author of the book “Democracy and Technology” (1995). (Futurist/Consultant.)
Date of prediction: May 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Washington Post
Title, headline, chapter name: The Ghost in the Modem: For Architects of the Info-Highway, Some Lessons From the Concrete Interstate
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.loka.org/alerts/loka.1.6.txt
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Taylor, Kellen L.