Predictions of the Future
I’m reading “The Wired Nation,” a 1970 piece by Ralph Lee Smith, assessing the great future of cable TV as a medium of liberation.
Some is pretty spot on:
Looking a bit farther into the future, it may be that we ’ are heading toward a single, unified system of electronic . communications. “Before very long,” says Brenda Maddox in a booklet entitled “Communications: The Next Revolution,” issued by the London Economist, “information theory will have been brought to its logical conclusion in public communlcations; there will be a single unified network for all kinds of messages . . separate systems for telephones. telegraph, television and data - transmission will disappear
lnformatlon will flow through the Network as on-off digltal slgnals and appear as pictures, sound or print, according to the choice of those sending and receiving it.” The speed with which such a network could rattle off bundles of information is hard
to appreciate.
Meanwhile, other predictions may have been a little off:
Another local and community service potential of cable television is so important that it must be separately discussed. CATV could arrest and reverse some ominous developments in American electoral politics.
Oh well.