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TECHNOLOGY FORETOLD
items to buy simply by sitting in front of your TV. Because the system is
interactive, you will even be able to decide what estate agent or travel
shop brochures you want to view’ (Daily Mirror, 4 October, 1995). He continued
in this vein in his early days as Prime Minister. ‘The day is not far off,’
he declared, ‘when interactive TV will give us the convenience of home visits
[by the doctor] that can be done through technology’ (the Guardian, 3 July,
1998). This resurrected a false prediction that Kenneth Baker had made sixteen
years earlier.
The third major source of endorsement was technology experts in
industry and universities. Here, a very idiosyncratic selection was made by
the press that included academics outlining implausible new technological
applications that never happened. For example, Steven Gray, professor of
communications and computer graphics at Nottingham Trent University,
featured in The Times (27 November, 1994) because he had developed a
way of enabling viewers to ‘try on a new dress on your TV screen’. This
facilitated, the professor explained, a ‘personalized home fashion show,
allowing shoppers to see what they will look like in the clothes before buying
them’. Nothing more was heard subsequently of this breakthrough.
This points to the fact that journalists were not simply ‘victims’ passively
reproducing a source consensus, but were also making editorial judgements
about what was newsworthy, and orchestrating stories in ways that
made for good ‘copy’. A stress on novelty accorded with traditional news
values. Articles about how new media would change how people live
(with headlines like ‘Are You Ready for the Future?’ (Sunday Times, 20
November, 1994)) were well suited to filling the expanding space devoted
to consumer and lifestyle content. The more extravagant the claim about
the impact of new communications technology, the more interesting – or
at least attention-seeking – was the article that reported it.
The United States was another source of seemingly disinterested
endorsement. It featured as a country where new media were blazing a
pioneering trail: in the early 1980s as a place where cable TV was creating
a ‘wired society’, and in the later 1990s where dotcom companies
were generating great wealth, and advanced interactive television
systems were being developed. The United States was also the home of
revered prophets. The ITAP Report (1982), widely reported in the
British prestige press, drew heavily on two popular American books on
cable television that proved to be misleading (Martin, 1978 and Smith,
1972). Press reports quoted on a number of occasions the MIT guru,
Nicholas Negroponte (for example, The Economist 19 August, 2000),
many of whose euphoric predictions (Negroponte, 1996) about interactive
digital television were never realized. The recurring tenets of
this tradition of US futurology – that new media would create wealth,
rejuvenate local communities, and empower the citizen – connected to
central themes of the American Dream.
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