Wrong.  Apple and Windows are like Ford and Chevrolet (or perhaps Tweedledum and Tweedledee), who in their co-imitation create a stereo illusion that seems like reality.  The computer guys don’t understand computers in all their manifold possibilities; they think today’s conventions are how things really are, and so that’s what they tell all the new victims.  So-called “computer literacy” is an illusion: they train you in today’s strange conventions and constructs– (Desktop?  This to you looks like a desktop?  A vertical desktop?) –and tell you that’s what computers really are.  Wrong.

Today’s computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole.  Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper.  But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished.  It’s just like “Space, we’ve done that!” — a few inches of exploration and some people think it’s over.

Any types of graphics are possible; yet the term “GUI”, supposedly short for Graphical User Interface, is used for only one kind of graphical user interface, the icon-and-window view they put together at Xerox PARC in the early seventies.  There are thousands of other things that a graphical user interface could be.  So we shouldn’t call today’s standard interface a GUI, since no graphic alternatives have been seen; it’s a PUI, or PARC User Interface, still almost exactly what they were doing at PARC twenty-five years ago.

The world you are brought up in has the seeming of reality; it can take decades to unlearn.  “Growing up” means in part finding out what’s behind the false assumptions and misrepresentations of everyday life, so that at last you understand what’s really happening and what the well-mannered pleasantries really mean and don’t.  But must our computer tools also be such a masquerade to be unlearned?

The usual story about Xerox PARC, that they were trying to make the computer understandable to the average man, was a crock.  They imitated paper and familiar office machines because that was what the Xerox executives could understand.  Xerox was a paper-walloping company, and all other concepts had to be ironed onto paper, like toner, to be even visible in their paper paradigm.

But who cares what Xerox did with their money?  That was lab stuff.  It was Steve Jobs that turned PARC’s work to evil.  He took a team from PARC and made a bargain with the Devil, and that bargain with the Devil was called the Macintosh.

There are still millions of people who believe that the Macintosh represents creative liberation.  For this astounding propagandistic achievement we can thank the Regis McKenna public relations company, which sold the Macintosh to the world (in the famous 1984 video commercial and after) as smashing the prison of the PC.  In fact the Macintosh was a newly-designed prison-a-go-go.  And that prison’s architecture has been devotedly copied to Microsoft Windows in remarkable detail.

Suppose they gave you MTV, and in return took away your right to vote?  Would you care?  Some of us would.  That’s how I think of today’s computer world, beginning with the Macintosh.  The Macintosh gave us Fonts, pretty fonts to play with, and graphic arts tools that previously were out of reach, except in the most high-budget realms of advertising and coffeetable book production.  Those fonts and graphic arts tools were a great gift.

But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away.

It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM.

If you bought an Apple II, you could begin programming it right out of the box.  I have friends who bought the Apple II without knowing what programming was, and became professional programmers almost overnight.  The system was clean and simple and allowed you to do graphics.

But the Macintosh (and now the Windows PC) are another story.  And the story is simple: PROGRAMMING IS ONLY FOR OFFICIAL REGISTERED “DEVELOPERS”.

The Official Registered Developers, who made deals with Apple and later Microsoft, are the only ones who can do the magic now.  This is not in the intrinsic nature of today’s computers.  It is in the intrinsic nature of today’s Deals.  Negotiate with Apple or Microsoft, pay them money or other favors, and they will let you know what you need in order to create “applications”.

This so-called Application was another level of the pact with the Devil.

In the old days, you could run any program on any data, and if you didn’t like the results, throw them away.  But the Macintosh ended that.  You didn’t own your data any more.  THEY owned your data.  THEY chose the options, since you couldn’t program.  And you could only do what THEY allowed you– those anointed official developers.

This new kind of Application was a prison cell, or perhaps we should say a cattle pen.  First you’re in ONE cattle pen, a first application, and then they take you in a bus to ANOTHER cattle pen, with another set of rules.  A second application.  You may get some of your data over between these applications, but it won’t be the same. The wide-ranging control of events that programmers have is denied to users.

Today’s arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG.  That’s where we’re stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. (“WYSIWYG” generally means “What You See is What You Get”– meaning what you get *when  you print it OUT*).  In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today’s software concepts.

This too was a key legacy of Xerox PARC.  The PARC guys got a lot of points with Xerox management by making the “electronic document” MIMIC PAPER– rather than extending it outward to include and show all the connections, possibilities, variations, parentheses, conditionals that are really there in the mind of the author or the speaker; rather than presenting all the details that the reporter faces before cooking them down.

Part of this was also the tekkie’s approach to the behavior of software.  Paper simulation worked well with the tekkie approach.  Many tekkies take a rectangular, closed approach to things which might seem to others to be clumsy, obtuse, anal.

The tekkie outlook is often the hireling’s mentality: that first you do this job, then you do that job, whatever is assigned to you; that the specs are given to you and don’t change; and when you finish the job assigned to you, you go on to the next job assigned to you.  None of these strictures has much to do with the kind of creativity that writers attempt.  But then most tekkies don’t understand about writing, or words.

Tekkies don’t understand about choosing the right word, the right name.  They seem to think any name will do; and whatever the user chooses, the user is stuck with.  This becomes the Nature of Computers.  Supposedly.

One result is office software that’s incredibly clumsy, with slow, pedestrian operations.  Think how long it takes to open and name a file and a new directory.  Whereas video-game software is lithe, quick, vivid.

Why is this?

Very simple.  Guys who design video games *love to play video games*.  Whereas nobody who designs office software seems to care about using it, let alone hopes to use it at warp speed.

I’m not talking about “interfaces”.  As soon as you agree to talk about the “interface” of something, you’ve bought into its conceptual structure.  I’m talking about something deeper– new conceptual structures that are not mapped to paper, not divided into hierarchies.

The same goes for “metaphors”, in the sense of comparisons to familiar objects like desktops and wastebaskets.  As soon as you draw a comparison to something familiar, you are drawn into that comparison– and stuck with the resemblance.  Whereas if you go into free-form design — free virtualities, as it were– you are not bound by such comparisons.

There have been a few environments that were abstract and completely different from paper.  Raskin’s Canon Cat, HyperCard (in its time).  My favorite abstract space is Dave Theurer’s game of Tempest, which looked like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Now consider the World Wide Web.  Even though some of us had been talking about planet-scale hypertext for years, it came as a pretty general shock.  So few noticed that it watered down and oversimplified the hypertext idea.

Hypertext, as suddenly adapted to the Internet by Berners-Lee and then Andreessen, is still the paper model!  Its long rectangular sheets, aptly called “pages”, can be escaped only by one-way links.  There can be no marginal notes.  There can be no annotation (at least not in the deep structure).  The Web is the same four-walled prison of paper as the Mac and the Windows PC, with the least possible concession to nonsequential writing (“nonsequential writing” was my original 1965 definition of hypertext) that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly have made.  Whereas the Xanadu Project, our original design which was beaten out by the Web, was largely based on two-way links by which anyone could annotate anything.  (And by which thoughts could branch sideways without hitting walls.)

Even stranger is the “browser” concept.  Think of it– a serial view of a parallel universe!  Trying to comprehend the large-scale structure of connected Web pages is like trying to look at the night sky (at least, in places that stars are still visible) through a soda straw.  Yet people are used to this sequential “browser”; by now it seems natural; and now this “browser” is perhaps more standard than the structures it views and the changing protocols that show them.

I feel a certain amount of guilt over this.  I believe it was in 1968 that I presented the full 2-way Xanadu design to a university group, and they dismissed it as “raving”; whereupon I dumbed it down to 1-way links and only one visible window.  When they asked how the user would navigate, I suggested a backtrackable stack of recently visited addresses.  I believe that this dumbdown, through the various pathways of projects imitating one another, became today’s general design, and I am truly sorry for my role in it.

Enough!  It’s time for something completely different.

I believe we can turn a corner to a computer world of far greater freedom and productivity, with new free-form structures unlike paper.  I expect these to greatly clarify and speed up the work of prose workers (those who use text without fonts– like authors, lawyers, filmscript managers, speechwriters, paralegals).

But we must overthrow today’s entrapment systems, to which many customers and manufacturers are committed.

We must overthrow the paper model, with its four prison walls and  peephole 1-way links.

Finally, we must overcome the tyranny of the file– meaning stuck lumps with final names.  While files are necessary at some level, users don’t need to see them, and much less need to give their projects unchanging names and locations.  Human creativity is fluid, overlapping, intercombining, and many creative projects overflow their banks time and again.  (It is well to remember that “King Kong” started as a documentary about hunting gorillas.)

Is it possible that the whole computer industry is a gathering of naked emperors?  The software industry has a vast investment in today’s entrapment.  So do “power users” of today’s “productivity tools.”

But tomorrow’s new users don’t.

Jim Whitehead

Early last June we received a gripping email, originally from Ted Nelson, forwarded via a friend, concerning an article in Wired magazine. Our copy of Wired still lay unread in our growing “read sometime” pile, though we had noticed the article on Xanadu, Nelson’s hypertext project. The email left us reeling:

The June issue of WIRED magazine contains an extremely nasty and mean-spirited article entitled “The Curse of Xanadu,” by Gary Wolf, which purports to be the obituary of Project Xanadu. The article is an affront to the alumni and veterans of the Xanadu project, some fifty of us over the years, contriving to make our endeavors look impossible and asinine …

Some background will help put this message in perspective. While most folks credit Vannevar Bush with the first description of hypertext-like capability in an article titled, “As We May Think,” published in 1945, the system he described (which he called Memex) was based on microfilm. In 1960, Ted Nelson invented computer-based hypertext for a term project while a graduate student at Harvard, and thereafter became increasingly consumed with his vision of global hypertext, which he called the Xanadu system. He coined the term “hypertext” and presented a paper on “zippered lists,” a key algorithm in his Xanadu system, at a national conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1965.

Given the dramatic growth of the World Wide Web (which still lacks many key features of the Xanadu system), you would think that Nelson would be accorded the same respect as other scientists and engineers whose work has dramatically entered our lives. However, due to early high expectations placed onto the Xanadu project, combined with a series of wrenchingly tragic setbacks, the Xanadu system is still struggling to reach market, decades after its conception.

Even though Nelson is not one to mince words, the intensity of his email message still took us by surprise. Digging out our Wired, we read through the offending article, and had to agree: the article is indeed a carefully crafted slam of Nelson and Xanadu (the article can be accessed via the WWW at http://web.archive.org/web/20041009214354/http://www.hotwired.com/wired/3.06/features/xanadu.html). Feeling that the mission of KUCI is to give marginalized voices a powerful outlet, we approached Nelson about appearing on the Cyberspace Report. A mere week after receiving his stunning email, Ted Nelson was our featured guest. Here are some excerpts from the interview.

Cyberspace Report: What inspiration led you to develop hypertext?

Ted Nelson: Well I was always, as a kid, into writing and reading and literature and movies basically, like a lot of people, and I had done a great deal of writing as a youth, and re-writing, and the intricacy of taking ideas and sentences and trying to arrange them into coherent, sensible, structures of thought struck me as a particularly intricate and complex task, and I particularly minded having to take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential and somehow put them in a row because print as it appears on the paper, or in handwriting, is sequential. There was always something wrong with that because you were trying to take these thoughts which had a structure, shall we say, a spatial structure all their own, and put them into linear form. Then the reader had to take this linear structure and recompose his or her picture of the overall content, once again placed in this nonsequential structure. You had two it seemed — and now I’m reconstructing because I don’t know how explicitly I thought this out as a youth — you had to take these two additional steps of deconstructing some thoughts into linear sequence, and then reconstructing them. Why couldn’t that all be bypassed by having a nonsequential structure of thought which you presented directly? That was the hypothesis — well the hyperthesis really — of hypertext, that you could save both the writer’s time and the reader’s time and effort in putting together and understanding what was being presented.

CR: What was your inspiration for the Xanadu system itself?

TN: Well basically Xanadu has always been coextensive with my whole paradigm — I gave a talk on this last night at Xerox PARC — which was that you want to be able to keep track of your own creative output being able to see the differences between my own versions and say, gee if I move this from the beginning to the middle, and lets try it that way, but then try moving the middle to the beginning in another version, how does it come out each way? So on the one hand, you want as a writer or creative constructor of anything, those tools which will most contribute to your understanding of the consequences of your own design decisions. On the other hand, for a new publishing system of the future, and it seemed manifest to me in 1960 that we would be reading and writing on computer screens that were interactive and all this would be fed by a vast feeder network of digital digitalia around the world, since we’re going to be publishing in a system of this kind, what would be the reward structure, what would be the document structure, and what would be the most beneficial extension of literature as we knew it. To me literature is the great ideal here, not some engineer’s notion of information retrieval. The engineers seem to have the notion that you can take the documents that are written and dip them in some sort of technical acid and the facts will fall to the bottom and then these facts will roll into their appropriate slots. This is not so. Writing is the way it is because every word generally has some kind of meaning. It’s finding these meanings and making them most useful to me that seems the great problem. So the issue is what will be the extension of literature into the great realm of interactive, multi-dimensional, many-threaded presentational forms. So Xanadu basically has been my name for an evolving but essentially centrally the same system for the supply and presentation of material with two basic relationships: what we would call the link, which is an unchanging connection between objects, or parts which are different, and the transclusion, which is a maintained connection between parts which are the same.

CR: It sounds like the Xanadu system, many many years ago solved a lot of the really pertinent problems that are just only starting to surface in the World Wide Web today. But yet the WWW has managed to become by now the dominant hypertext paradigm. For the vast majority of people in the United States right now when you say hypertext they think of Netscape or Mosaic and that is their notion of hypertext. Now that the WWW is so dominant, how does Xanadu have to change, to modify itself to fit into the new reality of a WWW world?

TN: That’s a good question, I’m still muddling with it. First of all, I think the WWW was a brilliant simplification. As I understand it, and maybe I have this wrong, but Tim Berners-Lee came and we had lunch, in, oh I guess it was 1989, 90, something like that, in Sausalito, and I really liked the guy, and he’d done this very simple thing, and it sounded too trivial to me {laughs} but he certainly was a nice fellow and I expected to keep in touch with him, although I am a very bad correspondent, and the next thing I knew suddenly the thing had caught on. And what it turns out to be is simply an extension of file transfer protocol, in other words it’s saying you can anonymously go in and dip in and take out this file and here is a proposed way to look at it. This is called HTML. You have to undestand the HTML/SGML kind of format where you’ve got all these warty little knobs and boogers in it that are formatting codes — this is absolutely contrary to the Xanadu idea that you have clean data undefiled. However, it works, it’s very simple, and you can always take those things out, so that’s OK. But all it is is FTP with lipstick so that you can look at these things and the jump addresses are hidden and the formats and you have paragraph levels and stuff and it’s basically what people needed and frankly I think it’s much better than word processing. I’m really happy now that I’m planning to switch from Microsoft Word to HTML just because there’s no need not to. It’s a perfectly good format, and it makes everything simpler to browse in.

CR: You’ve obviously been at one point a visionary…

TN: At one point? When did that end?

CR: Even now with the WWW your ideas are taking on sort of a new reality in some way shape and form…

TN: Or seemingly more real to some people.

CR: If some people who have what seem like visionary ideas right now, how would you encourage them to go about turning them into reality based on your own experiences?

TN: What would I recommend to a young visionary today? {laughter} Very straightforward, learn to deal with short term goals and not delegate. I trusted them {laughter} famous last words. These are people I still love and respect, but if I had been able to hold it together and {pause} not try to overstretch and overgrab and managed short term goals better, things would have been very different. But again I took a big goal as a single unit and then I turned it over to others who took it as a single unit and made it a bigger goal and thus postponed dealing with a well-defined situation.

CR: Well, certainly the Xanadu system has had sort of a checkered, and some would say, tragic history…

TN: Well I would agree with the tragic, but the past tense I don’t agree with. We’re having a meeting right now as to how best to put the system on the web because it’s still working better than it was in 1992, and as far as I know it can be finished.

CR: There was a recent article in Wired magazine which took a very critical view of the whole Xanadu project to date. I know I’ve received email from you where you were saying that you thought the article was almost libelous…

TN: Not almost, definitely.

CR: OK, definitely libelous. Would you care to comment about your objections to the Wired article, which many of our listeners probably have access to?

TN: Sure. Well it comes down to a great deal to personal viewpoint and personal integrity. People see the world differently and the reporter, whose name is Gary Wolf, makes his biases extremely clear in the article, but they were by no means clear when he so charmingly inveigled his way into my confidence. Now of course I’ve generally taken the point of view that posterity would like what I did and so I’ve trusted journalists as sort of ambassadors from posterity and this has been a mistake in general but, ahem, Mr. Wolf did not make his biases in any way evident when we saw each other. It turns out that the three things he most dislikes as far as I can tell are idealism, untidyness, and immodesty, all three of which he found in profusion in the Xanadu project. For myself, I have always hated things in people, well the people who I’ve regarded as shallow, conventional, pompous, and smug. So each of us hit the jackpot in the other. But as I say, he got to strike first, in this extremely scurrilous and nasty piece.

He emailed me recently saying, gee I seem to have overlooked all the positive statements, which is interesting because in my eight or so readings of the article I did not find one positive statement which was not immediately taken back by sarcasm or innuendo. What I object to as actually libelous in the piece of course has nothing to do — well of course it has something to do with it — but is not directly a matter of its tone or its nastyness. Libel consists of damaging, false statements which are being promulgated either maliciously or negligently. Now as a reporter your standards for negligence may be rather slippery but this man had definite access to a great deal of information and I believe he was extremely, shall we say, disingenuous in the use of that information and how he passed it on. For example he very amusingly talks about us as if we are blundering hobbyists and says that computer scientists would not have agreed with us, therefore according to Wolf we were not computer scientists, right. He says of Roger Gregory, my good friend whom he impugned and was much nastier to than me, he says Roger Gregory was not an elite researcher or computer scientist. Yet a few paragraphs later he mentions that Roger had developed a new addressing scheme based on transfinite arithmetic. Now I do not know what Mr. Wolf means by computer science, but within my world, someone who invents an addressing scheme based on transfinite arithmetic is not stamp collecting. That’s computer science, or it was that week, and this is serious stuff. By elite researcher I suppose he means “annointed researcher” such having PhD’s or working at Xerox PARC or being licensed to kiss the feet of so-and-so. But we basically, on our own, were doing important, strong work at the forefront and Mr. Wolf has made a point of trashing us and ignoring any indication we were not a bunch of deranged hobbyists. For example, he does not mention the contributions of Eric Drexler to the team precisely, I think, because eveyone agrees that Eric Drexler is a scientist, and therefore obviously doesn’t fit into Mr. Wolf’s thesis.

CR: Do you have any final, last words for our audience?

TN: No, but just thank you very much for listening Orange County, and I’m with you in spirit and good luck with the bonds.

A complete, digital copy of this interview can be accessed from the Cyberspace Report WWW page.

Copyright © 1996, Jim Whitehead

It was a brilliant article I read recently by Bob MacKenzie about the future of television.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the ancient, acidic book critic writing in Esquire, likes to refer to “future historians . . . if there are any.”

We must now consider the case of future television watchers, if there are any.

What will they watch, and on what?

Every era rewrites the future; visionaries of the 1960s told us about all the fantastic electronic gear that would doubtless bring the world into the living rooms of future Americans – not only in sounds and pictures, but in odors too; specials about pollution would come complete with stink. The images would likely be three-dimensional and life size. Some of the more fervent prognosticators even looked forward to feelevision.

Video screens, it was said with what seemed optimism at the time, would cover entire walls in our homes. Channels would be unlimited; the viewer would be able to tune in on a Russian news program or a course in Latvian cooking at the touch of a button, or rather, a wave of the hand over a sensory node.

Banking and shopping would be done at home through two-way television communications. Voting would be done directly through the video system. Local town meetings would be conducted through television, with the participants all sitting home.

Three-dimensional television, technically feasible through ionization of alpha particles in the air that fills the living room, would bring life-size actors walking around in the room. Viewers would be able to enter into the drama, play roles, with computerized dialogue responding to the home player’s improvised lines.

It all sounded wonderful. Or did it?

All those dreams of endless fun and self-improvement through the magic of super-television depended in part of the reigning ideology of the time which was: everything is always going to keep getting bigger and better.

Suddenly the doctrine of eternal abundance as a basic American right is seen as not so certain any more. We are running out of things. And the inevitability of progress can’t be taken quite so readily for granted.

It now seems possible that we won’t keep getting richer. The energy to run those room-size television screens and 3-D telecasts may have to be used for something more mundane…. like heating the joint or getting the old man to work and back.

The supersize television screens postulated a complete changeover in television technology; in other words, the scrapping of every piece of television equipment now in use – every home set, every camera and videotape machine. For, to increase the size of the screen considerably, we would have to increase the numbers of lines of transmission. That means new machines.

This could happen in 100 years. Almost anything could. But it probably won’t happen for a long while, so finish paying off that color set.

Does the energy crunch and all its attendant melancholy side-effects mean that television technology isn’t going anywhere?

Not at all. In the near future we’ll be receiving new messages new waves on new equipment – not in life-size tri-dimensional smellovision, but in conventional television with improvements.

Like miniaturization, for instance. This branch of the electronic sciences has boomed in the past few decades. The tiny transistors which replaced the cumbersome vacuum tubes have themselves been replaced by even tinier, miraculously encoded bits of metal called MOS chips. One chip the size of a nailhead replaces hundreds of transistors. Not only are they littler, they’re cheaper.

What does this mean for you and me? How about a perfectly flat television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture? Perfectly feasible in the near future. And the wrist television set, a la Dick Tracy, is now a practicable machine. Within a decade or so, you may be carrying a tiny walkie-talkie-like device in your shirt pocket. We may all be in instant audial and visual touch with one another.

Once the technology of miniature television receivers is worked out, they will be inexpensive to construct. And they will use less energy than present set, the pocket TV set will be as handy as a pocket calculator – and probably less expensive, since everyone will have one.

Every technological advance has its darker side, of course. If everyone is immediately reachable by two-way television, your boss will always be able to find you – not to mention your wife and your friendly local loan company.

Cassette TV is really on the way, too. A home library of cassettes will be a normal middle-class acquisition long before the Tribune Tower weathers its second centennial. But don’t expect home cassettes to arrive immediately, or to be inexpensive when they do arrive. It will be a long time before cassettes reach the mass-distribution economics of the music recording industry. even when it does, a taped television program will cost at least twice what you will pay for an LP music tape.

Since, as mentioned before, it’s just possible we won’t all be richer then, how will the average family buy TV cassettes of the movies, instruction courses, plays, etc, that will be offered?

Probably by renting cassettes, or borrowing them from public libraries. Cassette TV, when it arrives, will bring the convenience of books and magazines: the viewer will watch a program of his choice, at a time of his choosing.

Full-scale home cassette television should arrive within 10 years, provided we do not develop air shortage in the meantime, and provided the Japanese continue to improve in what used to be called American knowhow.

What about television programs? How will they change?

100 years in the future is very far ahead to peer; if there are still television programs then, they will be about things of interest to a people who will be as unlike us as we are unlike the steerage passengers in the Mayflower. Perhaps their programs will be instructional “How to Eat Plastic,” or “I Breathed in Los Angeles and Lived.”

Who knows? We will leave these matters to future television columnists, if any. But we can look into the immediate future and make some educated guesses about programs in 10 and 20 years, based on the ways programs are changing now.

The most immediately obvious evolution in television is toward bigger and better movies for television. In a very few years, features produced for TV have moved from skimpily budgeted trash (Z-pictures, one critic called them) to a healthy form that often supplies good entertainment and occasionally brings memorable drama.

TV-movies still supply plenty of trash (perhaps trash is a needed commodity; the world has never been without it), and budgets are still small. But changes are coming, and very soon.

Small budgets and high aspirations have managed fine television movies like “Brian’s Song”; but in the future producers may not be so confined in the money department. Ways are being found to produce full-scale motion pictures for television.

“The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” might be considered the first of anew generation of television movies. Produced with scope and size, this fine picture was budgeted at $900,000 – still a low expense for a theatrical movie, but double or triple the cost of most TV-movies. A network contract for four showings, plus planned revenue for European theatrical bookings, will pay for the film and bring a profit.

Another venture, on NBC, is called International World Premiere. By this plan, new movies for television will be seen on NBC the same night they open in theaters in other countries – so the producers, with revenues from both TV and theaters, can hire major stars and deliver full-scale production.

Eventually, as other ways of financing television films are found, movies for television will become the equal of theatrical movies – in quality if not in sensationalism.

At present the movie theaters are offering patrons what they can’t get on their home screens – bloody violence, nudity, sex, naughty words.

But even those never-failing attractions will be available on television in the future – if not in the regularly scheduled programs, then in cassette television. And, needless to say, Cassettes will bring the era of readily-available TV pornography. Whether that constitutes an advance for the civilized world the reader must decide for himself.

And as long as people persist in being human, television drama will concern the same subjects that drama has always treated: the timeless issues of love and faith and valor and ambition and loss, the yearnings of the heart and itchings of the glands.

People will always be interested in these things. And television, or whatever replaces it in the incalculable, unpredictable future, will still be staging the stories about the good guys versus the bad guys.

With any luck, the good guys will still be winning.

When it comes to conventional publishing we have the artifact of the book. For music we have records or cassettes and CDs – had, at any rate. Now we have itunes. And while that is a brilliant invention as well, one lost hard-drive and there’s nothing left of your music. No artifacts which reminded you of a birthday party or a really gorgeous summer day. The accelerated digitalisation which characterises our contemporary technologies operate to abandon the permanence of the artffact.

I find it interesting that on the one hand we have a society which is awash with information where everyone is seemingly making their mark (in manner of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame), while all at the same time our advanced technologies may actually be rendering us untraceable…Obviously this is all a bit dramatic, but still, its something to think about…

Because I am enamored of all things cyber, I decided to start this blog with an excerpt from Thea Von Harbou’s ‘Metropolis’, which novelised Fritz Lang’s film of the same name.

While the “machine” referred to here is a subterranean one, operated by workers beneath the city, the sentiment of this excerpt is transferable; expressing the way the many people perceive the potential of cyberspace, computers and the internet today.  

The machine was a universe to itself. Above the deep mysteries of its delicate joints, like the sun’s disc, like the halo of a divine being,stood the silver spinning wheel, the spokes of which appeared, in the whirl of revolution, as a single gleaming disc. This disc filled out the back wall of the building, with its entire breadth and height. [There was] no machine in all Metropolis which did not receive its power from this heart.