A video is being widely shared on social media in which a person can be seen predicting things about the internet. The caption hints that the viral clip is of English actor, singer-songwriter David Bowie’s interview with Newsnight (BBC) in 1999.
The video is being shared with caption that reads, “David Bowie predicts the impact of the internet on Newsnight (1999).”
In the video, he can be heard saying, “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think that the potential of what the internet is going to do to society both good and bad is unimaginable. No, it’s more than that. For instance, I think in the future we’ll be wasting hours and hours of our lives watching videos of cats and dogs being adorable. And we’ll share those videos with our friends. And our friends will respond not through words but with a row of little circular laughing cartoon faces. And we’ll call that progress. And also we won’t be able to watch any of those videos without having to skip an advert first. And that advert will be tailored to your internet viewing habits. Although for some reason it will always be about some disgusting oatmeal cereal that you’ll never buy anyway. And we’ll also spend vast portions of our time on websites called social media sites, which we will hate but we will have six different accounts for and we will spend most of our time looking for people online to have arguments with. And there will be far-right groups spreading misinformation about immigration on these social media sites which will then be shared by members of our own family and this will confirm what we’ve always suspected which is that our Auntie Linda is a massive racist. Most importantly we’ll be able to access all of this on our phones. So when we go to bed we’ll take our phone with us. When we go to the toilet we’ll take our phone with us. When we come out of the shower we’ll grab our phone to see if we have missed anything. And we won’t dry ourselves with a towel anymore. We’ll just sit on the edge of our beds just dripping wet just scrolling on our phones. Just scrolling and scrolling because the scrolling never ends. You just keep scrolling and one day a far-right government will take advantage of the fact that we’re just spending all day arguing with strangers on the toilet and they will seize power while we’re not looking and that is when freedom and democracy will become a thing of the past.”
The link to the post can be seen here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did a fact-check and found the claim to be false.
On searching with the keyword, “David Bowie, Newsnight”, we found BBC Three had uploaded the original video of David Bowie’s interview aired on BBC Newsnight on Facebook in 2019, where he was talking about the internet. BBC Three shared the interview clip with the caption that read: “Bowie: “It’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all … David Bowie died three years ago today. Back in 1999 he made this incredible prediction about how the internet would change our lives forever to a sceptical Jeremy Paxman.”
We compared the man in the viral video with David Bowie and found no resemblance of facial features between the two.
We also found that a website Smooth Radio had done a story on David Bowie’s interview on February 16, 2021. In the article, they quoted his statements from an interview with Jeremy Paxman in 1999, which read: “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg…I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. No. It’s an alien life form [laughing], is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here. The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about. It’s happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.”
We further found that a comedian, Michael Spicer, had uploaded a video in which he took clips from Newsnight 1999 and added his own video dressed as Bowie.
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