Today in 1995, the Media Laboratory at MIT chronicled the World Wide Web in its A Day in the Life of Cyberspace project.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Media Lab invited submissions on a variety of issues related to technology and the internet, to "create a mosaic of life at the dawn of the digital revolution that is transforming our planet."
The head of the Media Lab (and a columnist for Wired magazine) at the time, Nicholas Negroponte, published Being Digital in January 1995. The review of the book in The New York Times provided a handy summary of his predictions:
[Negroponte] predicts that within 10 years, Americans will spend more time on the Internet than watching network television, and video-on-demand will have put videocassette rental stores out of business. In the not too distant future we will all have private multimedia "butlers," programmed (eventually by voice command) to screen our telephone calls, schedule our days and select our entertainment. The bits of information that stream into our homes will be converted into customized newspapers, featuring our favorite columnists. Raw data about the weather -- or about a football game -- will be converted at our whim into a printout chart, a verbal report, a video picture or a miniature re-creation in our living rooms.
The reviewer found this “technically fascinating” but asked a question which is still very relevant today: “Do we really want slave machines organizing our lives? According to the view from M.I.T.'s Media Lab, these developments -- for reasons that I totally fail to grasp -- are supposed to make for a better world, "decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering."
In 2014, historian Thomas Haigh provided a broader perspective in “We Have Never Been Digital”:
“Digital” acquired a new resonance from 1993, with the launch of the instantly fashionable Wired magazine. In the first issue of Wired its editor proclaimed “the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon,” just as enthusiasm was building for the information superhighway and the Internet was being opened to commercial use…
Whether utopian or totalitarian, imagined future worlds tend to depict societies in which every aspect of life has changed around a particular new technology, or everyone dresses in a particular way, or everyone has adopted a particular practice. But in reality as new technologies are assimilated into our daily routines they stop feeling like contact with an unfamiliar future and start seeming like familiar objects with their own special character…
According to science fiction writer William Gibson, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That brings me comfort as a historian because of its logical corollary, that the past is also mixed up all around us and will remain so.