Somewhere, Heinlein comments that predicting the direct effects of technological change is relatively easy. What is harder is predicting indirect effects. His example was the automobile. He argued that it had a substantial effect on sexual behavior by giving couples a place to make love out of sight of parents.





I am not sure how convincing that example is, but it occurs to me that we have another and clearer one. Did it occur to anyone, ten or fifteen years ago, that one effect of the development of cell phone technology would be, by providing practically everyone with a pocket video camera, to greatly increase public opposition to police beating people up?





The closest I can think of is in David Brin's Transparent Society, where he argued that, in a future where everything is subject to surveillance, the transparency ought to go in both directions: The police can watch us, but we can also watch them. I do not think it occurred to him how we would get there or that the essential change would be not in what you could see but in what you could record and offer for public view.



P.S. Judging by comments, I may have been unfair to Brin, working off my memory of one book, not all of his writing.