Expert predictions about a new medium’s social uses are routinely wrong.

Evidence

For nearly half a century after its invention in 1876 the telephone’s social implications were badly misjudged by analysts and even by the phone company itself. For those of us who wish to anticipate the impact of the Internet on social relations, the astounding series of poor predictions about the social consequences of the telephone is a deeply cautionary tale. Alexander Graham Bell himself originally expected the telephone to serve the sort of broadcasting function that would later become the province of radio—“music on tap.” Well into the twentieth century telephone executives were so convinced that their primary customer was the businessman that they actually discouraged “socializing” by telephone. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 544

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Expert and lay predictions of obedience were wrong by a wide margin — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 437; Crowdsourcing and leak tactics repeatedly misfired and produced false accusations — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 491

Broader Connections

• Expert and lay predictions of obedience were wrong by a wide margin #exemplifies (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 437
• Crowdsourcing and leak tactics repeatedly misfired and produced false accusations #exemplifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 491