When futurists were first outlining scenarios for electronic news delivery, they didn’t foresee the overwhelming demand for interactivity, nor the consequences of multitudes of competing information sources.
The Internet has so transformed our lives that we may forget how recently it came about. Interestingly, one of the industries it’s transformed most radically—journalism—was in the process of changing anyway.
“Futurists have long speculated that newspapers would someday be delivered electronically to people’s homes. In Britain, electronic newspapers are already a reality,” THE FUTURIST reported in “The Electronic Newspaper,” April 1978.
In that article, Kenneth Edwards, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, took FUTURIST readers on a tour of Britain’s Viewdata system, a scheme whereby information could be transmitted by teletext from a BBC editor’s office directly to viewers’ televisions at home.
While the technologies were being developed to provide online access to news, information, and other communication, another unexpected phenomenon was beginning to occur: a call from media consumers to participate in the process.
Nearly a decade after Edwards’s article, Mike Greenly wrote about his experience as one of the world’s first interactive electronic journalists (“Interactive Journalism and Computer Networking: Exploring a New Medium,” March-April 1987). In addition to covering the World Future Society’s 1986 conference electronically, Greenly also used computer conferencing to cover the Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1984 (for which Greenly struggled to obtain press credentials).
As he hauled his portable computer to interview such luminaries as New York City Mayor Ed Koch for research on his book Chronicle: The Human Side of AIDS, Greenly sent reports back to a computer bulletin board on The Source (a predecessor of AOL). When he checked back in after a day’s reporting, he would find responses and queries from readers.
“I had a following to whom I offered my reports,” Greenly wrote. “Not just my own attempts at journalism, but interactive journalism, since people could write back to me and electronically converse with each other.”
We caught up with Greenly recently to get his thoughts on today’s—and tomorrow’s—media environment.
“Back when we—myself and scattered online buddies around the world—were exploring or inventing what ‘electronic journalism’ could be, the corporations who were hosting us didn’t seem to have a clue,” he recalls. “They kept pushing stock quotes, news feeds, and weather, but the pull we users felt to spend more time online came primarily from each other and from what we each had to share.”
Welcome to the first glimpse of Web 2.0!
“Today’s online world has surpassed, already, our expectations for it,” Greenly continues. “We knew that people-to-people sharing would only grow and flourish, and we demonstrated for ourselves the power of an on-the-spot ‘reporter’ being able to respond, live, to the queries of distant readers. But we didn’t envision, for example, the impact of broadband to enable the global sharing of YouTube videos of dancing cats or government oppression.
“As for tomorrow,” he adds, “I would personally strongly favor stricter regulation of publicly crediting content. If blog X lifts content from blog Y, for example, I think it must always be clear who generated the original content. That kind of accountability is clearly in the public interest, so that we always know the source of reports or ‘news’ we can trust versus lies disguised as fact.
“As usual, technology is outpacing regulation,” Greenly observes. “But the fast-growing critical mass of online readers and reporters (and the blur between them, since people can play both roles) will—I believe and I hope—lead to clearer legal guidelines that protect content providers, encourage them to keep providing, and enable all of us to use or avoid them, depending on what matters to us.”
Coincidentally, Greenly’s 1987 article appeared in the same issue in which THE FUTURIST described a technology enabling researchers to better communicate with each other—“ScholarNet: The Beginning of a World Academic Community” by Richard W. Slatta of North Carolina State University. We would later know this technology better as the Internet.
About the Author
Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST and editor of the World Future Society’s e-newsletter, Futurist Update. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.
For more information, visit Mike Greenly at www.mikegreenly.com.