Bowyer’s Bite-size Blogettes

Bowyer’s Bite-size Blogettes

Alex Bowyer  //  A British thirtysomething living in Montréal, Canada, with interests in people & society, technology, science fiction, films, travel and getting the best out of life.

Can also be found blogging at alexbowyer.blogspot.com and tweeting as @alexbfree.

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Oct 21 / 8:53pm

Charlie Brooker demonstrates why you can't believe anything you see on TV

via youtube.com

Almost every piece of TV, movie, news or documentary footage you see has been edited to try and make a particular point. This video illustrates quite convincingly the power of editing and why you should hesitate to form judgements unless you're watching live unedited footage.

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Filed under  //  editing   media   propaganda   reality-TV   television   truth  

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Oct 8 / 12:46pm

Fascinating vision of the Internet age from 1990

via video.google.com

This is Hyperland, a BBC2 documentary with Douglas Adams, Tom Baker, Ted Nelson and others, broadcast in 1990 - that's before the World Wide Web, before DVDs, before digital TV, before the Internet as we know it.

What's quite remarkable is the amount that it gets right:

  • When we browse the Internet, we don't follow a prescribed narrative path, instead we jump around and switch focus regularly to find out a random fact or branch off into a different topic.
  • When watching video footage or listening to an MP3, we can skip to different sections (think DVD chapter menus or podcast position markers). We can click out to related content (think YouTube timelined clickable comments or BBC's interactive TV "red button")
  • We can create representations of ourselves in the virtual world as we explore and communicate with others, from social website profiles through to Second Life avatars
  • We are just beginning to be able to use technology such as Layar or Pocket Universe to augment reality with additional useful information
  • The nature of the documentary itself, skipping as it does between items of interest, is an interesting portent of today's short-attention-span, focus-shifting approach to consuming information.
  • It correctly predicts that one of the biggest challenges is the need for a language for "hypertext" (remember this is before HTML was invented).
It even predicts some things we are only just beginning to see, such as interactive storytelling and intelligent software agents.

All in all, well worth 50 minutes of your time if you are interested in changes in technology and media and their effect on society.

I found this today on Russell Davies' blog.

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Filed under  //  agents   futurism   hypertext   interactive-storytelling   multimedia   society   technology   television   trends   virtual-reality  

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