Imagined futures 6: Learning from home

Image source: Chicago Sunday Tribune

Back in 1959, when television was still monochrome, and movie films ruled the entertainment industry, people were already dreaming about how we could capture the moving image for home use. Video recorders were very much in their infancy. The first commercially available video recording device wasn't available until 1956, and the more affordable home video cassette recorders (VCRs) such as VHS and Betamax would not be seen in homes for at least another two decades.

The text from this image reveals a lot about the hopes and aspirations of futurists in 1959. The 'electronic home library' in the illustration is reminiscent of any traditional library one might have walked into during the 20th century, with its organised shelves and rows of physical media. Nic Negroponte's vision of 'atoms becoming bits' was still a distance dream for the few visionaries who could actually conceive a purely digital world, where physical media had more or less become obsolete.

Another interesting feature in the illustration is ceiling projection - ostensibly to make text more easy to read and to 'increase impact on students', but of course this could be extrapolated to any image, still or moving, and the article does moot the idea of accompanying audio ('electronic voice'). This is the essence of all multi-media, where text, images, video and sound are combined to provide the user with a rich experience of knowledge and information access. It's interesting that right now, developers are working hard to create affordable projectors that can work on just about any surface, including our own skin. Therefore the principle of the electronic home library was a fairly accurate prediction, but the means through which it might be accomplished was rooted in the 20th Century.

Previous posts in this series:
1: Telecommunications
2: Classrooms
3: Music
4: Enhanced vision
5: Robot teachers?


Imagined futures 6: Learning from home by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.