Before the Internet became everything for everybody, a lot of people thought it would be something else entirely. Here are just a few predictions of what a future (read: present) online world would look like...
The new Internet will maintain old gender roles
For all the futuristic advancements “The Jetsons” promised, what with flying cars and elevated cities (no doubt to keep everyone safe from the zombie hordes below), the cartoon was very old-fashioned when it came to gender roles. George Jetson went to work as the man while his wife Jane stayed at home (and Rosie the Robot cleaned the house, patiently waiting for the day of the bloody android uprising). The very same “future” appears in the above video from 1969 about what the Internet might be like. While they got some of the tech right, they still predicted a world in which only men would use the Internet for serious business (perhaps to land that lucrative yet elusive “Henderson account”) while women sat at home, buying clothes for hours on end. Then the wife would send the bill to her husband (because, at least according to this video, there was no way a woman could have her own money), at which point he’d look at it and probably grumble something from the 1950’s like “She bought a SECOND pair of shoes?! How many feet does she have, anyway?!”
People will never just sit and stare at a screen all day
This was a rather odd prediction, given it came after 40 straight years of people doing nothing but sit and stare at the TV screen, even when viewing options were so dismal there were actually two different “Baywatch” series on in the same year. But the thought was people would find sitting in front of a screen too impersonal and removed from others, despite the fact that thanks to social media most of us have made more friends than thought possible. Even better, we don’t get so close to these friends that we have to attend their baby showers or even change out of pajamas to meet them, thereby allowing everyone to finally live the dream.
No one would ever buy a damn thing over the computer
In a 1995 article, Newsweek magazine stated—in a manner befitting an old man shocked to find women now expose their ankles at the beach—that no one would ever “buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet” and that you could never “tote that laptop to the beach.” The thought was apparently that nothing changes, EVER, which would make sense if the Sears Roebuck catlaog was still the main form of entertainment and the leading cause of death was accidental wheat scythe beheadings. But instead, 2012 saw people spend $1 billion a day shopping online during the holiday season ....the very same year Newsweek ended its print run.
The Internet won’t take off at home because there will be no home computers
For as long as home computers were a possibility people were saying that finding a market for them would be utterly impossible. Oddly enough, the people who said this the loudest were often those whose financial success depended on computers. In 1943, the CEO of IBM declared, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” a remark that must have really endeared him to his stockholders. Then in 1977, the president of Digital Equipment Corporation stated, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” as if it were a frothing grizzly you’d be insane to let into your house, even if the bear would be a nifty way to store recipes electronically. Of course, the real problem may have been that—as reported in a 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics—“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons,” meaning most homes would never be structurally sound enough to support an Apple IIe.
The Internet will end…in 1996
Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, once proclaimed, "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." Which was an unusual statement given that he said it in 1995, meaning he thought the Internet had a mere 12 months before it would destroy itself and society would have to go back to using mail or well-aimed scribbled paper airplanes to argue over the rather recent ending of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” What Metcalfe meant was that the Internet was growing far too quickly for the technology to support it. That prediction obviously turned out not to be true…unless the Internet really did supernova, killing us all and so we now live in a heavenly state in which we still can’t get the new SimCity to work properly online.
Skynet
Okay, so this isn’t so much a prediction as a plot device. But the fear and hysteria were all the same: “If the computers link together then they’ll get to talking and you just know they’ll start badmouthing us and wanting to take over and before you know it BOOM!…they’ve emptied out all our saving accounts.” Or something like that.
Which prediction do you find to be the most ridiculous? Let us know in the comments!
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