I am a huge fan of Huffduffer - a service that lets you capture audio and download it as a podcast - and I follow the feed on Twitter, mainly because it allows me to see if there's some interesting bits of audio being huffduffed. The other day, I found this great podcast through this method.
The Science Friday radio show did a podcast looking back at an episode from 1993, the first ever radio broadcast to be also put out on the internet. It's like a time capsule with amazing insights into how the early internet was viewed by the general public. It's from a time before the web really took off, when the entire internet community was vastly smaller. It's absolutely fascinating.
The topics brought up: internet communities (and how they could increase social interaction), international collaboration, connection issues, global warming, information overload (and how it's not actually that bad), democratisation of information, government 2.0, social gaming, verification issues, cutting out the middleman (i.e. the music and film industries), social curation, copyright infringement, syndication (to some extent), data filtration, and loads more. All of these are still issues today, and it's amazing to see how little it's actually changed. I think it gives hope that the internet has not negatively affected our lives, as some would have you believe.
The presenter talks with obvious ignorance of how you "work the internet", describes how to get information on the internet and speaks about "electronic mail".
Absolutely fascinating bit of audio, that (for me) shows the importance of the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment