7 ms·

Handheld phones and video calls were easy to predict by extrapolation. No-one predicted Twitter, social media, usenet, forums and the idea of things going 'vira

Handheld phones and video calls were easy to predict by extrapolation. No-one predicted Twitter, social media, usenet, forums and the idea of things going 'viral' because that requires a complete paradigm shift to 'anyone can publish'. It's a fundamental of how the world works now but it wasn't on anyone's radar 50 years ago as anything possible, useful or interesting.

deleted 5y ago
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mullen 5y ago
I disagree that Usenet and Forums would not have been easily predicted. Town Squares, Public Forums and Message Boards have been around for thousands years and I don't see why anyone would have thought they would not have existed in the electronic space. Societies have always had 1 to 1 and 1 to Many communication, so it would be natural that some form of those would exist in electronic communication.
- codeulike 5y ago
  Go and find me someone that predicted it then. Edit: yes 1 to many communications existed but they either required expensive publishing or they were tied to a physical location (eg a physical notice board). Internet forums are globally available for anyone who is interested to read or publish and that turns out to be phenomenally powerful but in a way that pre-internet people could not have conceived of
  - baq 5y ago
    Maybe not back then, but I got distinctive usenet vibes back when I read Ender's Game (novel, 1985); nowadays I'd probably get reddit or facebook vibes. Not sure what parts of message boards concept existed in the 1977 version.
    - watmough 5y ago
      xkcd take on this that still cracks me up: https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/
      - tomrod 5y ago
        I sorta figured reddit was a more likely representation, especially with the rise of very good but amateur accounts like /u/poppinkream
  - fzzzy 5y ago
    The WELL was available in 1985. One of the motivations for designing the original Apple I was connecting to mainframe based bulletin boards, in the 70s. CompuServe started selling dial up access to their service in 79. GEnie was available in 85. Delphi was available in 1981. Quantum Link was available in 85 and became AOL in 88.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - asdff 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_villag...
    - codeulike 5y ago
      Ok yep that's along the right lines
    - phs318u 5y ago
      Wow. “So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…”
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Roll back one academic generation further to McLuhan's mentor, Harold Innis. It was Innis who'd first drawn the connection between medium and tenor / characteristics of communication. See especially Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis
  - lostphilosopher 5y ago
    "As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use, and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussible, too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." - From the London Times of 1904, Mark Twain https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/from-the-london-times-of-1904 https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
    - codeulike 5y ago
      That's pretty interesting, thanks
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  >...and Message Boards have been around for thousands years This is naive of me -I had never considered that there were physical message boards with replies being tacked onto the original message.
  - codeulike 5y ago
    It would be cumbersome though - if one thread grows too long, someone has to re-arrange the whole board to make it fit etc. I imagine long conversations would be very rare on that platform. Message boards would mostly be one off messages ' bike for sale' etc
asdff 5y ago
Stuff was viral as soon as the printing press was invented and one could distribute printed material and have physical meetings. Instead of logging into some radical forum, you'd just drop everything and run off into the woods with Charlie Manson. The stuff coming out of Donald Trump's mouth has been the same rhetoric that's been all over AM airwaves for 50 years. Plenty of people figured this stuff out, earned doctorates in it, taught lectures in it, were hired on as consultants for it. This is why this stuff is so successful today, because propaganda is a long established science with a mountain of literature explaining just about everything you see play out today.
- codeulike 5y ago
  By viral I mean accidentally viral - random things that somehow capture the zeitgeist - Jackie Weaver, Bean Dad, Bilal Göregen, Num Num Cat TikTok Chain, podcasts that suddenly blow up, etc
Animats 5y ago
Read "The Machine Stops" (1909).[1] Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music was silent. "I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately. "Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: "Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”." Sound familiar? [1] http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html
- codeulike 5y ago
  I love that story but the passage you quote is akin to answering a phone call and broadcasting a lecture. The Machine Stops is prescient in many ways but it does not explore the ramifications of a world where anyone can publish
  - Animats 5y ago
    "She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously." That's the key line there. A more highly connected world, intermediated electrically.
    - codeulike 5y ago
svieira 5y ago
The pamphleteers would like a word with you - starting about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press and continuing to hold sway until the widespread acceptance of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars (of which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(1776) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(177... is one of the most striking older examples).
aardvark179 5y ago
I think there’s a reasonably amount of science fiction that predicted that ideas might go viral and spread, but what is lacking is the idea of things like Wikipedia where there is an overall level of trust, but that certain subject areas will be much less reliable. The closest I can think of is Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand where some subject areas of General Information (a system run by the Web) are notoriously out of date, but were probably accurate when written. I have often wondered if Tim Berbers-Lee read that book.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  OSC's Ender's Game pretty much nailed blogging, in 1977. Though the OG is probably E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909). (Animats beat me to that by 3 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
secondaryacct 5y ago
I remember my dad telling me one day we could see each other over the phone and finding this insanely cool. We imagined it as a sort of mini tv on top of the landline phone. No one predicted me writing to you from an elevator in Hong Kong and having the speed of interaction under a few milliseconds. And now that I Skype my dad across the ocean, it seems like a very secondary and minor feature of the internet. Whatsapp alone changed how we interact with far away family as if we never left.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mullen 5y ago

I disagree that Usenet and Forums would not have been easily predicted. Town Squares, Public Forums and Message Boards have been around for thousands years and I don't see why anyone would have thought they would not have existed in the electronic space. Societies have always had 1 to 1 and 1 to Many communication, so it would be natural that some form of those would exist in electronic communication.

codeulike 5y ago
Go and find me someone that predicted it then. Edit: yes 1 to many communications existed but they either required expensive publishing or they were tied to a physical location (eg a physical notice board). Internet forums are globally available for anyone who is interested to read or publish and that turns out to be phenomenally powerful but in a way that pre-internet people could not have conceived of
- baq 5y ago
  Maybe not back then, but I got distinctive usenet vibes back when I read Ender's Game (novel, 1985); nowadays I'd probably get reddit or facebook vibes. Not sure what parts of message boards concept existed in the 1977 version.
  - watmough 5y ago
    xkcd take on this that still cracks me up: https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/
    - tomrod 5y ago
      I sorta figured reddit was a more likely representation, especially with the rise of very good but amateur accounts like /u/poppinkream
- fzzzy 5y ago
  The WELL was available in 1985. One of the motivations for designing the original Apple I was connecting to mainframe based bulletin boards, in the 70s. CompuServe started selling dial up access to their service in 79. GEnie was available in 85. Delphi was available in 1981. Quantum Link was available in 85 and became AOL in 88.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- asdff 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_village https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan#Global_villag...
  - codeulike 5y ago
    Ok yep that's along the right lines
  - phs318u 5y ago
    Wow. “So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…”
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Roll back one academic generation further to McLuhan's mentor, Harold Innis. It was Innis who'd first drawn the connection between medium and tenor / characteristics of communication. See especially Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis
- lostphilosopher 5y ago
  "As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope, it was delivered to public use, and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussible, too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." - From the London Times of 1904, Mark Twain https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/from-the-london-times-of-1904 https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
  - codeulike 5y ago
    That's pretty interesting, thanks
41b696ef1113 5y ago
>...and Message Boards have been around for thousands years This is naive of me -I had never considered that there were physical message boards with replies being tacked onto the original message.
- codeulike 5y ago
  It would be cumbersome though - if one thread grows too long, someone has to re-arrange the whole board to make it fit etc. I imagine long conversations would be very rare on that platform. Message boards would mostly be one off messages ' bike for sale' etc

asdff 5y ago

Stuff was viral as soon as the printing press was invented and one could distribute printed material and have physical meetings. Instead of logging into some radical forum, you'd just drop everything and run off into the woods with Charlie Manson. The stuff coming out of Donald Trump's mouth has been the same rhetoric that's been all over AM airwaves for 50 years. Plenty of people figured this stuff out, earned doctorates in it, taught lectures in it, were hired on as consultants for it. This is why this stuff is so successful today, because propaganda is a long established science with a mountain of literature explaining just about everything you see play out today.

codeulike 5y ago
By viral I mean accidentally viral - random things that somehow capture the zeitgeist - Jackie Weaver, Bean Dad, Bilal Göregen, Num Num Cat TikTok Chain, podcasts that suddenly blow up, etc

Animats 5y ago

Read "The Machine Stops" (1909).[1] Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music was silent. "I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately. "Who is it?" she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: "Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”." Sound familiar? [1] http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

codeulike 5y ago
I love that story but the passage you quote is akin to answering a phone call and broadcasting a lecture. The Machine Stops is prescient in many ways but it does not explore the ramifications of a world where anyone can publish
- Animats 5y ago
  "She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously." That's the key line there. A more highly connected world, intermediated electrically.
  - codeulike 5y ago

svieira 5y ago

The pamphleteers would like a word with you - starting about a hundred years after the invention of the printing press and continuing to hold sway until the widespread acceptance of the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars (of which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(1776) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine#Common_Sense_(177... is one of the most striking older examples).

aardvark179 5y ago

I think there’s a reasonably amount of science fiction that predicted that ideas might go viral and spread, but what is lacking is the idea of things like Wikipedia where there is an overall level of trust, but that certain subject areas will be much less reliable. The closest I can think of is Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand where some subject areas of General Information (a system run by the Web) are notoriously out of date, but were probably accurate when written. I have often wondered if Tim Berbers-Lee read that book.

dredmorbius 5y ago
OSC's Ender's Game pretty much nailed blogging, in 1977. Though the OG is probably E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909). (Animats beat me to that by 3 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29784546)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

secondaryacct 5y ago

I remember my dad telling me one day we could see each other over the phone and finding this insanely cool. We imagined it as a sort of mini tv on top of the landline phone. No one predicted me writing to you from an elevator in Hong Kong and having the speed of interaction under a few milliseconds. And now that I Skype my dad across the ocean, it seems like a very secondary and minor feature of the internet. Whatsapp alone changed how we interact with far away family as if we never left.