Recent Predictions and Comments

     "Built when computers were an anomaly, when telecommuting was unheard of and well before the birth of the Word Wide Web, the Allen Teleport is a prescient concrete embodiment of what were, at the time, futuristic concepts." - David F. Donnelly, Ph.D.

     "In the future, we will see those few early home grown amateur web pages that people have bothered to preserve on display in museums as quaint historical artifacts." - David Donnelly, 8/97.

     "Andy Warhol's prediction that we would all have our '15 minutes of fame' is becoming reality in a sense, only it should be updated to read '15K of fame.' " David Donnelly, 8/97.

     "Where the Internet will succeed is when the Internet and TV really come together in a way that makes the Internet as simple as television." - Tom Rogers, from John McLauglin's One on One with Tom Rogers, President and Founder, NBC Cable Television (8/97). Reprinted with Permission, Federal News Service (202 347-1400).

     "The debate over the nature of the Internet- whether it is improving or ruining us- is really an argument about the nature of the people using it. " - Wall Street Journal Editorial, 8/7/97, A15, the week of the Vonnegut/MIT hoax.

"I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially elimianting such chores as going outside to the mailbox or to the adult bookstote, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble." Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up, pg. 76

     "The Net, the very network itself, you see, is merely a means to an end... The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack politics down to its component parts and fix it." - Joshua Quittner, on the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The following comments are from Brockman, J. (1996). Digerati: Encounters with the cyber elite . San Francisco: HardWired.

     "The net is becoming less and less a thing and more and more an environment." - Esther Dyson, p. 84.

     "A new kind of community, nor a culture, is coming. The difference between a culture and community is that a culture is one-way- you can absorb it by reading it, by watching it- but you have to invent back in a community. Absent this return investment, it's not really a community." - Esther Dyson, p. 86.

     "The Net is a fad. The Web is fad, an interesting fad. ............. When the Net really matters to American culture and society, people won't recognize it. It is going to happen with software lot different from what we see today." - David Gelernter, p. 106-7.

     "The Internet is a brand-new fertile ground where things can grow, and the Web is the first thing that grew there. But the stuff growing there is in very primitive form. " - W. Daniel Hillis, p. 125.

     "The impact of the Internet on human communication has the potential of leading you to increasingly superficial interactions with more and more people. " W. Daniel Hillis, p. 126.

     "Looking down the road, the Internet promises something even more exciting than people interacting: computers interacting with computers in trivial ways." - W. Daniel Hillis, p.128.

     "I was optimistic about the grand promise that the Internet would create a multiplicity of communities, until about a year ago. The Internet as it is today lacks the necessary bandwidth to give you a real community. Communities are as much about smell and texture and touch as they are about intellectual content. " - John Markoff, p. 190.

     "People say that there about 30 million people on the Internet. .........The real figure is about a million people. This is not a number to sneeze at, but it's certainly not 30 million. Until the next leap - the Web is put into a consumer appliance, like your telephone, or your television, or something you can carry around with you, where it is really accessible to everybody ...... " - John Markoff, p. 190.

     " Too much computer power is coming too quickly to think that the keyboard is going to be the interface in five or ten years." - John Markoff, p. 191.

Other Recent Predictions

     "In the sense of making money, it doesn't look like anybody is going to win on the browser software side, because it's going to be free" - Steve Jobs, 1996.

     "Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency" -Steve Jobs , 1996.

     "Sales generated on the Internet will grow to $46 billion by 1998" - ActivMedia 1996.

     "Web advertising will increase to $5 billion by 2000" - Jupiter Communications 1996.

     The Electronics Industries Association predicts that PCTVs will penetrate the market faster than the VCR or compact disks. They are predicting that they will reach 17% of the consumer market over the next five years. (From Broadcasting & Cable, 10/28/96, p. 58)

     "The desktop market is going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade" - Steve Jobs (1996)

     "Online commerce volume will hit $150 billion by 2000, more than $1 trillion by 2010" - Internet Digest (1996)

     Robert Pittman, the creator of MTV, VH-1 and Nick at Nite and a former CEO of the Six Flags amusement parks, has been named to head America Online's AOL Networks, the company's most visible unit. Speaking of the online industry, Pittman told reporters during a conference call Tuesday, "I've seen this movie before. This is a development that is very similar to the cable network business in the early and mid-'80s. It's the mass market moving, and the mass market in this case is moving to interactive services." FROM STUDIO BRIEFING 10/30/96 (for subscription info, contact: LIRWIN@delphi.com)

     "The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people's wildest predictions." Nicholas Negroponte, from his book Being Digital, 1995, p. 231.

     "A student body that once said, 'I want my MTV' is about to be succeeded by one that demands, 'I want my WWW.' " Carol Cartwright, from an article in Educators' Tech Exchange , Fall 1995, p. 8.

Past Predictions

     In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a means of information access that resembles the current means of linking information via hypertext. In 1964, Martin Greenberger used Bush's proposals to outline market possibilities for information services, electronic commerce and community. The Atlantic Monthly has reprinted both of these early visions of the info-age.

     "A scant 100 or so persons throughout the world now use computerized conferencing on a regular basis. But the time may be fast approaching when far more people will be conferring through computers and we will begin to view computer conferencing as a 'natural' way to interact. "
- An Altered State of Communication? June 1975, J. Vallee, Robert Johansen, and Kathleen Spangler.

     "The wreckage of videotex makes us think of young, upscale moderns clicking away with their computer "mouses" as they checked the stock market, did"online" shopping or made vacation plans on richly colored screens. Instead, a more practical and more widely useful information service would be less dramatic, at least in its first incarnation. Like the basic telephone service, it would also be directed at the entire American population: the poor as well as the middle class and wealthy; the rural dweller as well as the urbanite; and the elderly, the disabled, and the non-English-speaking." -- Frederick Williams in Media Studies Journal, Fall 1991.