When Old Technologies Were New
People adopting new technologies are very apt to predict that the new ones will simply amplify old ones. Carolyn Marvin, in her 1988 book (When Old Technologies Were New) notes the “tendency of every age to read the future as a fancier version of the present.”
Because people in the late 19th century were taken by the idea of mass audiences viewing electric light messages in the night sky, they assumed that twentieth century media would take the form of messages splashed on faraway surfaces by vast numbers of electric lights:
“Imagine the effect,” speculated the Electrical Review, if a million people saw in gigantic characters across the clouds such words as 'BEWARE OF PROTECTION' and 'FREE TRADE LEADES TO H–L!'” . . . According to one electrical expert, “You could have dissolving figures on the clouds, giants fighting each other in the sky, for instance, or put up election figures that can be read twenty miles away.”
So as we get used to online communications, we need to figure out whether our guesses about the future are based on our constrained imaginations. As it turned out, television made us retreat to our own living rooms rather than watch outdoor spectacles projected onto the clouds.
Analysts started off believing that internet use would destroy social relations. More recently, the findings [pdf] seem more nuanced — use of the internet may reduce television watching time (and perhaps some family face time), but what we're doing online is engaging in our favorite human activity — socially communicating. And, in increasing numbers, contributing [pdf] to the online commons.
No big conclusions yet, though. We're still barely at the beginning of human adoption of online communications. We're just emerging from the “fancy telephone” stage of internet history.
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