Falling prophets

“Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.”

So wrote the celebrated American inventor Thomas Edison in 1913. It's a well known quote, and is more representative of his fervour for the moving picture than it was of reality. His enthusiasm for the fledgling motion picture industry was justified however. It took the world by storm, but not at the expense of books. Motion pictures also failed to revolutionise school systems by the way.

Another well known quote from the Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck in 1946 reveals more about our tumultuous romance with technology:

"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." 

Like Edison, Zanuck had a personal vested interest in the future success of the motion picture industry, and viewed the introduction of the television as nothing more than an aberration. Yet just as Edison had grossly underestimated the power and appeal of the book, so Zanuck was proved wrong with about the demise of television. What can we learn from these earnest but erroneous predictions? Firstly, we need to be careful how we predict the future. We should pay more attention to context than content. Technology trends are capricious but our need to access information is a constant. We should understand that people are inherently curious, and will use whatever medium is available to satisfy their hunger for news, entertainment, and social contact.

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has gathered all media together in one 'place'. The convergence of text, audio, video, and the emergence of hypermedia provide us with the ultimate playground. We no longer need to ask whether books are dead. If we like reading, then books will survive, whether they are paper based or digital. The same applies to any other medium.

Photo by Robert Parvlainen on Flickr


Falling prophets by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.