Crystal ball backwards

* An excerpt on telematics, which is the broad area that NaviBlog is in, with an interesting view of the early explosion in the wired network and its effects on society, as seen from France in the 1970s. There was apparently something called the Nora-Minc Report, which probably spawned the visionary French MiniTel internet-like system way ahead of its time in the 1980s.
* Funny how 30 years on, things are pretty much turning out the way they predicted:

"By the mid-1970s, French industries were frightened of IBM and worried about the British experiments in videotext--the (failed) experiment in selling information services to British subjects via their television screens and telephone touchpads. French intellectuals and scientists were beginning to write about the significance of the coming information age. Pressure was mounting on the government and industry to do something more than modernize an antiquated telephone system. The DGT obtained a superministerial budget in 1975 to develop a megaproject. In 1978, Simon Nora and Alain Minc submitted a decisive report, requested by the president of the French Republic, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, on "the computerization of society."

The Nora-Minc report, as it is still known, was bold in its forecasts: "A massive social computerization will take place in the future, flowing through society like electricity. . . . The debate will focus on interconnectability. . . . The breakdown of power will be determined between the people who create networks and those who control the satellites. . . ." The report concluded that the advent of cheap computers and powerful global communications media was leading to "an uncertain society, the place of uncountable decentralized conflicts, a computerized society in which values will be object of numerous rivalries stemming from uncertain causes, bringing an infinite amount of lateral communication." To continue to compete in the first rank of nations, Nora and Minc exhorted, France would have to mount a full-scale national effort in the new field they named Telematique (merging the French words Telecommunications and informatique). They didn't fail to note that "Telematique, unlike electricity, does not carry an inert current, but rather information, that is to say, power" and that "mastering the network is therefore an essential goal. This requires that its framework be conceived in the spirit of a public service." (from globaltelematics.com, itself an extract from Howard Rheingold's Virtual Communities)