The prediction, in brief:

Print may pass away but words and stories survive; a good story is worth a dozen jeremiads any day.

Predictor: Moulthrop, Stewart

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine, Stewart Moulthrop, a teacher and hypertext designer, writes:”From Neil Postman’s ‘Technopoly’ down to more recent tracts by Bill McKibben, Sven Birkerts, Cliff Stoll, and Mark Slouka, publishers have fed us a steady stream of technophobia. Technology is the enemy of Nature, the books say. We should return to a time when we could commune with rocks and trees and growing things – and, of course, with books. Any capitalist worth his or her derivatives can tell you what’s really going on. Now that they’ve been absorbed by lean, mean, risk-averse conglomerates, publishers must protect their stakes in the mass-market economy. Appeals to ‘nature’ are almost always a sign of desperation. When McKibben or Slouka say ‘nature,’ think ‘The New York Times bestseller list.’ The technocritics see their comfortable mass markets crumbling into complex niche arrangements. These fears may be legitimate, but civilization, culture, and history should not be confused with microeconomics. Some events resist the zero-sum logic of local competition. Postman says this: ‘Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological.’ In the long run, new media do not erase or extinguish old ones; they intermix and crossbreed, changing all communication in the process. Postman forgets this early in ‘Technopoly,’ but Stephenson remembers it throughout ‘The Diamond Age.’ The Primer is an ecologically updated version of a book – not a static object, but an active interface to a global information network. It may look ‘exactly like a book,’ but it is actually a nanotechnological parallel computer linked to a biomechanical processing collective. What does this incredibly complex machine do? It brings people together and helps them share stories, much as books have always done and as the best parts of the Internet do today. To be sure, Stephenson’s novel also contains some heavy technological anxiety. Revolution is a scary proposition, and Stephenson lets us know it. But in its vision of a reinvented book, ‘The Diamond Age’ offers a useful parable for the contemporary silicon decades. Print may pass away but words and stories survive; a good story is worth a dozen jeremiads any day.”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Publishing

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: Very Like a Book

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/moulthrop.if_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney