From an article by Toby Manhire In The Internaut:
An imagining of the future by JG Ballard, the British essayist and sci-fi author, in a 1977 essay gives a pretty impressive account of the pervasiveness of social media – and reality television – 36 years later.
It’s from Vogue, and titled “The future of the future”:
Far more sophisticated devices have begun to appear on the scene, above all, video systems and micro-computers adapted for domestic use. Together these will achieve what I take to be the apotheosis of all the fantasies of late twentieth-century man — the transformation of reality into a TV studio, in which we can simultaneously play out the roles of audience, producer and star …
All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.
Read the article at The New Zealand Listener
