November 25, 2009
I Have
A long, long time ago – in 1993 – AT&T ran a campaign called You Will, that showcased a few visions of where they predicted telecommunications would be in the next 10-15 years. And wouldn’t you know it, they were pretty danged close on most of it.
My friend Molly sent me the link, and I found it absolutely captivating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.
Like I said, they weren’t too far off at all. Half of that video looks eerily similar to parts of my daily life that I don’t even think twice about. Sure, the GPS was a little over the top with its animation, and I’ve never bought concert tickets at a cash machine (aka kiosk), but I buy movie tickets just outside the theater on a system that looks almost identitcal to that one just about every time I go. And watching movies on demand? It pretty much looks exactly the way AT&T envisioned it 15 years ago, and that’s only been status quo for a couple of years now.
And right there is one of the things that really amazes me about this campaign. That 15 year old footage of the “future” could easily be used in a commercial to have that installed in your home today. When I saw the on-demand movies segment, I didn’t even bat an eye at it. But, when it was filmed, most people couldn’t even comprehend how that would ever be possible. Television was built on broadcasting. There was no interactivity. Television stations had a program schedule, they broadcast to it, and you received their signal that they controlled.
But a television on which you could control what you wanted to watch and when you wanted to watch it? That’s Star Trek. I bet you didn’t even notice that those kids were watching a wall-mounted flat screen, did you? In 1993, most people had never even seen one. Star Trek, man.
Even more interesting to me, though, is that the concepts of the internet and mobile technology are completely vacant from each of those scenarios. The woman used a phone booth to video into her home; the iPhone 3GS could do that. The man sent a fax from the beach; email was a fun but unreliable tool in ’93. The student from the other side of the world “borrowed” a book by linking into a webcam feed as opposed to downloading the text of the book from a repository. People didn’t understand the concept of one giant interconnected link of millions computers, thus most of the clips were based around one to one communication.
At first, I thought that AT&T had no idea that the internet was going to be as huge as it is back in 1993, and thus they didn’t use it in any of their examples. The more I’ve thought about it, though, I’ve realized that they knew; they just had to dumb it down so people could grasp it.
You're gonna want that 'Woo Woooo!'
Still, I think it’s fascinating to see today’s technology applied to the early 90s lifestyle and communication standards. It’s almost like looking at Victorian images of the future that still have everything running on steam and helium in the year 2000. They took established technologies and just expanded on them as far as their imaginations could go; they hadn’t even conceived the idea of combustion engines or computer transistors, which made steam all but obsolete overnight.
If mobile technology hadn’t exploded like it had, phone booths would still be everywhere, and they’d be far more advanced. If the internet hadn’t erupted, we’d still rely on the one-to-one connections that phone lines can supply. Faxes, phone calls, and one-way video feeds would be it.
Thank you, Al Gore.