The musician David Bowie was remarkably prescient in a 1999 interview about what the Internet would do to society:
… I think that we, at the time until at least the min (19)70s, really felt that we were still living under… the guise of a single and absolute created society where there were known truths and known lies and there was no kind of duplicity or pluralism about the things that we believed in.
That started to break down rapidly in the 70s and the idea of a duality in the way that we live. There are always two, three, four, five sides to each question. The singularity disappeared and that, I believe, has produced such a medium as the Internet which absolutely establishes and shows us that we are living in total fragmentation.
I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying!
… It’s an alien lifeform!
I’m talking about the actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can really envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico, it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.
Except “the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico”, he was right about several things: the magnitude and imminence of change, the fragmentation of opinion and of truth and the emergence of new forms of content, entirely new mediums.
The 16 minute interview with BBC Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman is on YouTube. The quote above starts at 9 minutes 10 seconds in: