Last winter I went to Disney World with a couple of friends, and while other visitors waited in seemingly endless lines to go on the newest rides — rides that turn you upside-down, rides that skim precipitous drops, rides that accelerate at ungodly rates that bring to mind scenes from cartoons in which a character’s body shoots forward while his head remains behind, his neck stretching comically long — we spent our most pleasant late afternoons and evenings in that haven for pregnant women and children who are not yet “this tall”: Tomorrowland. Contrary to what its name suggests, Tomorrowland is less a peek into the future and more a glimpse into the past; the “tomorrow” to which it refers was decades ago. It is filled with rides and exhibits that were sleek and modern 40 years ago but now seem quaint and adorably misguided, like a drawing done by a five-year-old.

The gem of the Tomorrowland collection is the Carousel of Progress. Originally built for the 1960 World’s Fair in collaboration with General Electric, the Carousel cycles riders through four animatronic dioramas taking place in different times — the turn of the 20th century, 1920, 1940 and “today” — each of which features the same family boasting about their newest technological comforts. When G.E. withdrew their sponsorship in the early 1990s, the Carousel was refurbished, both to eliminate all mentions of G.E. and to modernize “today’s” diorama. The updated take-home message, very much a vestige of the early nineties and once again adorably misguided, seems to be that videophones are the wave of the future and will revolutionize telecommunications as we know it.

What does this show, aside from the importance of corporate sponsorship (the AT&T logo is liberally sprinkled throughout the new videophone additions)? That, despite an immeasurable love for technology and for predicting where that technology will take us, humankind has a history of painfully inaccurate predictions. An article in last Sunday’s New York Times provides a neat example of this, quoting pundits of the past opining on how the newest (at the time) technological marvels would impact the world.

Sometimes the prognostications call for abysmal failure — “Television won’t matter in your time or mine,” one critic is quoted as saying — but more often they predict unfettered success, frequently culminating in world harmony: disparate worlds, each speaking its own language and following its own mores, are brought together by the sheer uniting force of the technology; warring factions “reach out and touch someone” and realize the folly of their ways; the lines that separate persons, nations and cultures are blurred, resulting in one unified, peaceful, happy people. In 1946, Thomas Hutchinson is quoted as saying that television “should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring understanding and peace on earth, than any other single material force in the world today,” and in 1922 a writer in The New Republic predicted that radio would eventually reduce all of the world’s orchestras, universities, newspapers and books into standardized audio that would be broadcasted across the globe.

Similar hopes (or perhaps fears) have been voiced for that wonder child of technology, the Internet. And the predictions seem more likely than ever to be correct; the Internet makes the same information available to (nearly) every corner of the world and allows ideas and trends to dissipate across cultures almost instantly. If ever all cultures were to meld into one, the Internet would likely be an impetus.

But I don’t think that there will ever be a melding of cultures or a “universal” culture. If anything, the overly idealistic predictions of the past have shown that this is nigh impossible. People will always have different customs, different tastes in food and different ways of dressing in order to differentiate themselves from some and align themselves with others, because culture is not just a static result of differing environments but a social process of forming and breaking alliances.

Which is not to say that technology hasn’t had and will not have any influence on cultural differences. At the risk of sounding adorably misguided 40 years hence, I predict that as increasingly advanced forms of media develop, the very nature of culture itself will change; rather than being a function of geographic location, it will become a function of social “location.” With access to information about every behavior and the type of people who employ each, people will be able to pick and choose their culture according to however they want to represent themselves. Food, clothing, mannerisms, even the way a person speaks will be determined not by what the people living near him do but by what the people he feels close to do. Nationalities — American, Portuguese, Azerbaijani — will be replaced by personalities — Academic, Jock, Atheistic-But-Spiritual Hippie. Unlike the traditional model of acculturation, in which identity follows culture, culture will follow identity. It’s starting to happen already, as technology and time blur the boundaries between ethnicities.

Whether this will be beneficial or detrimental remains to be seen. A world divided up less neatly — where culture clashes occur over backyard fences instead of country borders — could lead either to greater tolerance or to greater friction; neighbors can work their differences out over a cup of whatever beverage they prefer to drink, or they can lob grenades into each other’s living rooms. Whatever happens, one thing is for sure: the people of the world will never all get together, join hands and sing a song in Esperanto.