Making links

[nmg]

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.

The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).

The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Comments

The Golden Age of Television.

[killtest.livejournal.com]

Long since having taken the decision to dump the goggle box, the one thing I miss more than comedy shows is documentaries. Let me qualify that, interesting documentaries. When I was getting rid of the video tapes I mentioned that a significant portion were documentaries and a few people who requested tapes were enquiring after specific ones. Some I had.

Ridiculously I kept a few. No tv, but a box of tapes, including two of my faviourites, Red Star In Orbit (about Korolev, the Soviet Chief Designer) and Billy, How Did You Do It? concerning Billy Wilder. Both three part investigations. I think it would be safe to say that BBC2 (and later to a degree, early Channel 4) played a better part in my general education than my schooling.

I regret that television-commissioned documentaries - decent films in their own right, just not fiction... - rarely get released as DVD, or made available in some high quality format, beyond the original broadcasts and subsequent repeats. People read non-fiction, but a concomitant amount of non-fiction just doesn't appear available in the corresponding visual media market.

Re: The Golden Age of Television.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The World At War is available on DVD. I watched it through about a year back. Fantastic stuff, and avoids many of the failings of modern documentaries (constant repetition and padding with snazzy graphics being the chief among them).

Re: The Golden Age of Television.

[killtest.livejournal.com]

This is why I said 'rarely' rather than never. I appreciate that certain, high-profile documentaries - especially series, which have a tendency to be popularist - do get a release.

I don't know whether it's a sign of the times that as the audio-visual tech gets cheaper, documentaries become more reliant upon them. I am not worried by the technology used, merely that, as it seemed to become more extensive, the MANNER of documentaries became considerably less refined. To use the media's own label 'dumbed down.' Back when the tv was still sat in the corner I noticed this particularly towards the end, around 2002. Things to do with dinosaurs and the history of the planet. I don't accept that just because they've got better animation they have to be written DOWN to the average Sun-reader. The whole point is to drag them UP to a more appreciative level.

The dumbing-down and dramatization of modern documentaries

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

is one of my (many) pet hates. Factual programmes do not need booming voiceovers. It's particularly notable in natural world stuff, despite the most famous and (I assume popular) examples being Attenborough's understated "here is an animal, here is some footage of the animal, here are some interesting facts about the animal" approach.

This penchant for the "EXTREEEME!" has a lot to answer for.

Re: The Golden Age of Television.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I concur. It's a crying shame that many of these documentaries aren't available, because many of them are superior to those which have followed them.

A case in point - the production team which made Hyperland made a documentary about virtual reality called Colonising Cyberspace. Michael Hordern narrated, and it had John Perry Barlow (of the EFF), Brenda Laurel, Jaron Lanier, Howard Rheingold and William Gibson as talking heads. Like its predecessor, it used the medium to describe itself (sort of). Intelligent stuff.