The excellent Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian found a 1997 article in which Garrison Keillor made predictions about the future of different aspects of American life, including the media. Here’s a couple of passages: the first accurately predicts the rise of reality TV while the second wrongly believed that people would mourn the demise of newspapers:

1.

“People will feel nostalgia for celebrities, real ones, like there used to be back when there were three TV networks and Americans watched the same shows at the same time and talked about them the next day at work. Television was common currency. Sunday afternoons you watched the NFL game with your dad on the couch and then you went to the table and ate pot roast and mashed potatoes. Everybody else did the same thing.

Every American knew Sinatra by sight and by voice, but when you scattered the audience among 200 cable-TV channels and 1,000 movies you could watch on the Internet and 10,000 CDs you could down-load, there weren’t many true celebrities anymore. People will miss them.

There will be new celebrities, thousands of them, but not many people will know who they are.”

2.

“People are not going to dress up as us or stage re-enactments of our wars or collect our cellular phones, our books on healing and empowerment, our CDs of Old Age music, our pepper grinders, our billions of T-shirts. They will resent what we did to the country, and we will go down in their history as the age of effluvia, with the simple moral: If you love trash too much, you will make yourself stupid.

By ‘trash’ I don’t mean a publication such as The New York Times. People are going to miss it a lot – they’ll think: What a wonderful thing a newspaper was! You opened it and there it was, you didn’t have to wait three minutes for the art to download, and when your wife said, ‘Give me a section,’ you did.”