“ Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
—
The Internet? Bah! - Newsweek in 1995 (via ojacko)
It’s humorous how narrow-minded and wrong the author was. Negroponte has a gift of looking 10 or 20 years down the road at what’s possible (he showed off multi-touch interfaces at TED in 1984), while this guy was looking purely at what currently existed.
However, most interesting was how ominously accurate the author’s final paragraph was:
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is…
