|
The video clip shown above — an excerpt
from a 1967 Philco-
Ford production entitled "Year 1999
A.D.," starring a young Wink Martindale — did a fairly
good job of anticipating some ways (if not the specific
forms) in which technology might be used in daily life
more than three decades in the future. Concepts such as
"fingertip shopping," an "electronic correspondence
machine," and others envisioned in this video anticipate
several innovations that became commonplace within a few
years of 1999: e-commerce, webcams, online
bill payment and tax filing, electronic funds transfers
(EFT), home-based laser printers, and e-mail.
As noted, although the technological concepts expressed
in the video may be familiar to us, the specific forms
used to realize them are somewhat different than their
common modern implementations:
- The "fingertip shopping" the wife
engages in imagines the shopper remotely controlling
cameras placed in stores to scan merchandise rather
than working with virtual representations of stores
(i.e., web sites).
The "household monitor
screen" isn't so much a webcam as it is a simple
closed-circuit video security system.
- The bills and tax forms the husband works with are
scanned images of paper forms rather than electronic
forms.
- The "electronic correspondence machine" (e-mail)
depends on the user's writing messages by hand with a
pen and a stylus rather than typing them with a
keyboard and monitor.
The concepts are nonetheless relatively
well-expressed, even if they don't quite match up with
some of the finer points of modern technologies.
However, the video exemplifies the common flaw of
anticipating technological changes but not societal
changes — the daily life it depicts is firmly rooted in
the mid-20th century American model of
women as stay-at-home child rearers and shoppers, and
men as breadwinners and heads of household. Apparently
women in 1999 still wouldn't be deemed to be up to
handling tasks such as banking, bill-paying, and tax
preparation, even with the help of electronic devices.
-Source: Snopes.com |
