The more modern sort of person – “the creative, organising, or masterful type” – sees the future as our very reason for being: “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.” Wells, of course, hoped to personify that creative, forward-looking type.
The conclusion has a reasonable take on the current scene around social media-
A river of messages is a “timeline”– you’re in my timeline; I heard it in my timeline – but the sequence is arbitrary. Temporal ordering can scarcely be trusted. The past, the present, the future go round and collide, bumper cars in a chain of distraction. When distance separates the thunder from the lightning, cyberspace puts them back together.
In the wired world, creating the present becomes a communal process. Everyone’s mosaic is crowd-sourced, a photomontage with multiple perspectives. Images of the past, fantasies of the future, live videocams, all shuffled and blended. All time and no time. The path back through history is cluttered, the path forward cloudy.
So this could be a way to look at print and web over time. There are trends but also loops. For example I still think the Guardian may stop the weekday print version but when this happens is unknown. It just seems more likely from time to time. Saturday in long form ok for a while.
So my blogs still include speculation / observation but no precision as to timing.