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Communications futurism
Dec. 18th, 2007 09:18 pmThe relative accuracy on display in this 1967 futurist film (which apparently convinced some people that it was fake), and some musing about Profiles of the Future on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke's 90th birthday, lead me to propose the following general rule:
20th century futurism concerning communication devices is almost always much more accurate than any other type of 20th century futurism.
Reading the Paleo-Future blog for a while makes this fairly clear. We honestly do seem to have ended up with a world in which a lot of science-fictional communication devices became real, with some superficial changes. Commonplace videophones were one of the canonical failed predictions for a long time, but they're slowly emerging, albeit in a somewhat different form. People kept thinking up something like e-commerce in various guises. These "ristos" aren't on our wrists because that's kind of a bad place to put them, but, otherwise, if anything they're a highly conservative description of modern mobile phones (also, check out this 1910 article). And television was probably the real major 20th-century invention that had the most advance publicity, decades before it actually emerged—to the extent that it made some modern blog commenters think this 1900 Ladies Home Journal article was fake. Big flat-screen wall displays appeared all over the place, of course, from "The Machine Stops" to Fahrenheit 451. The details aren't quite right but it's a far cry from Moon cities and meals-in-a-pill; predictions are as likely to be too conservative as too wild.
I suppose the big exception—the flying car or ray pistol of the genre—is the proliferation of holographic video displays in futurism and science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. Simple holograms rapidly became cheap and cheesy consumer items, and there are various ways to hack a (usually headache-inducing) stereoscopic display with some depth to it, but I don't think you're going to get a holographic TV any time soon. Oh, yeah, and automated language translation is a lot lamer in reality than in the predictions, though it doesn't keep people from using it anyway.
20th century futurism concerning communication devices is almost always much more accurate than any other type of 20th century futurism.
Reading the Paleo-Future blog for a while makes this fairly clear. We honestly do seem to have ended up with a world in which a lot of science-fictional communication devices became real, with some superficial changes. Commonplace videophones were one of the canonical failed predictions for a long time, but they're slowly emerging, albeit in a somewhat different form. People kept thinking up something like e-commerce in various guises. These "ristos" aren't on our wrists because that's kind of a bad place to put them, but, otherwise, if anything they're a highly conservative description of modern mobile phones (also, check out this 1910 article). And television was probably the real major 20th-century invention that had the most advance publicity, decades before it actually emerged—to the extent that it made some modern blog commenters think this 1900 Ladies Home Journal article was fake. Big flat-screen wall displays appeared all over the place, of course, from "The Machine Stops" to Fahrenheit 451. The details aren't quite right but it's a far cry from Moon cities and meals-in-a-pill; predictions are as likely to be too conservative as too wild.
I suppose the big exception—the flying car or ray pistol of the genre—is the proliferation of holographic video displays in futurism and science fiction from the 1970s and 1980s. Simple holograms rapidly became cheap and cheesy consumer items, and there are various ways to hack a (usually headache-inducing) stereoscopic display with some depth to it, but I don't think you're going to get a holographic TV any time soon. Oh, yeah, and automated language translation is a lot lamer in reality than in the predictions, though it doesn't keep people from using it anyway.