I just named it. It's easier to see if you look back into history and read about what people thought was coming. I think the clearest example is in online news. People in the 1980s tended to talk about receiving a newspaper on your computer, but it's hard from 2012 to really understand what they mean by that because we automatically fill in the blanks with what we know about how online news works. What they really saw was getting a newspaper online. Not even to the extent that you would use the New York Times website today; literally, conceptual screenshots of a computer screen picturing a newspaper, in a layout that we would dismiss in fractions of a second nowadays as worthless. The bolder of them imagined that you would be able to customize the newpaper's articles. Only a small handful of visionaries had even a sketch of what we actually have today.
Because instead what we got was RSS, Slashdot HN and Reddit, comments on newsites, partisan blogs and just blogs in general, aggregators and communities and yes, even some fairly newspapery sites that still have radically different layout and affordances.
But that's just one particular example from living memory. I remember seeing people hypothesize about playing board games like chess online, which is chess-by-mail, BOAC. Sure, we do that, but we also play Team Fortress 2. There's still a lot of people trying to make sure that television is just like cable television, BOAC, instead of embracing what computers can do, as Netflix is doing, let alone the many people who are actually using computers on a small scale to make movies that would blow the socks off of even a fairly well equipped home town TV studio fifteen years ago.
Just about the only domain I can think of that has immediately perceived and embraced computers as fundamentally transformative and revolutionary is the arts. The instant anything like a synthesizer appeared in the world, musicians were using them to make new sounds in every way they could think of. Computer special effects didn't go through a phase in which they were just used to replicate existing effects more cheaply until the mid-200xs, which seems to be over. The very first video game was immediately something that could not be replicated in the real world.
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I just named it. It's easier to see if you look back into history and read about what people thought was coming. I think the clearest example is in online news. People in the 1980s tended to talk about receiving a newspaper on your computer, but it's hard from 2012 to really understand what they mean by that because we automatically fill in the blanks with what we know about how online news works. What they really saw was getting a newspaper online. Not even to the extent that you would use the New York Times website today; literally, conceptual screenshots of a computer screen picturing a newspaper, in a layout that we would dismiss in fractions of a second nowadays as worthless. The bolder of them imagined that you would be able to customize the newpaper's articles. Only a small handful of visionaries had even a sketch of what we actually have today.
Because instead what we got was RSS, Slashdot HN and Reddit, comments on newsites, partisan blogs and just blogs in general, aggregators and communities and yes, even some fairly newspapery sites that still have radically different layout and affordances.
But that's just one particular example from living memory. I remember seeing people hypothesize about playing board games like chess online, which is chess-by-mail, BOAC. Sure, we do that, but we also play Team Fortress 2. There's still a lot of people trying to make sure that television is just like cable television, BOAC, instead of embracing what computers can do, as Netflix is doing, let alone the many people who are actually using computers on a small scale to make movies that would blow the socks off of even a fairly well equipped home town TV studio fifteen years ago.
Just about the only domain I can think of that has immediately perceived and embraced computers as fundamentally transformative and revolutionary is the arts. The instant anything like a synthesizer appeared in the world, musicians were using them to make new sounds in every way they could think of. Computer special effects didn't go through a phase in which they were just used to replicate existing effects more cheaply until the mid-200xs, which seems to be over. The very first video game was immediately something that could not be replicated in the real world.