I had an extraordinary time in Ghana with programme 1 of Digital Revolution, travelling around with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Apart from hanging out with Timbl, the most exciting aspect was meeting people in Abiriw, in the mountains outside Accra, and speaking with them about how they use the web.
I recorded this vlog for the BBC DigRev blog about my impressions of this superb journey:
Check it out on the Digital Revolution blog
Presenter Aleks Krotoski and Programme 4 director Molly Milton talk about the themes being explored for the fourth episode of Digital Revolution. (This was filmed at the end of last week before Aleks flew out to the US to start filming programme 1).
Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
Wednesday 2 September 2009
I have, in effect, been living under a videogames rock for the past three months. My self-imposed exile at the hands of a looming PhD thesis submission date and the subsequent two weeks in a recovery position has rendered my bleeding-edge knowledge of computer gaming obsolete. When confronted with the headlines announcing trends, new releases and banal news, I feel like an OAP outpaced by the young whippersnappers who’ve staked out their turf in my neighbourhood: “Get offa my patch you little devils!” I want to shout, while shaking a gnarled PlayStation 1 controller at them. “Whateva, grandma,” they’d throw back, casually cool with their Wiimotes and iPhones. Harumph.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been rather po-facedly debating the contemporary Nation-State: one union under the World Wide Web, facilitated by the Internet, threatening the sovereignty of modern political structures. Now, we’re going to turn the tables and look at what the Web is doing to us. No, not along the lines that Internet- sceptics like Baronness Susan Greenfield propose (we’ll be getting into that in our final programme), but at what we are giving up of ourselves to the people behind the websites every time we go online.
Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
Wednesday 19 August 2009
There are few things more satisfying in life than levelling up. That, after all, is what games are all about. As a long-time player, I have a tendency to look at the world through console-coloured glasses. Recently, I had one of those mini-boosts in XP when I was on a train. I had quite happily, furiously, been scribbling in the margins of a document, drawing spaghetti arrows from one end to the other and back again, jotting down incomprehensible notes for myself and scratching out passages of text, when out of the blue my pen ran out of ink. It wasn’t blocked, it hadn’t dried up: I had used the entire charge of red in my ballpoint pen, from the moment it was first de-capped through to its final stroke. When I realised just what had happened, I heard that telltale little “ding” and knew I had a new trophy for my achievements shelf.
In 1995, in the summer before I moved to the UK, I was living just outside the Washington D.C. Beltway, not far away from the world headquarters of America Online. In those days, AOL ruled the roost; in the States at least, they dominated the commercial world wide web home market, and had a pretty solid stake in the business ISP world too.
The nation-state, argued Bill Thompson at the Web@20 event that launched the Digital Revolution project, is an outdated phenomenon. The World Wide Web is engendering trans-national identities based on communities of practice not tied to traditional forms of governance, he claimed. This revolution is powerful and is changing our politics at such an unprecedented speed that it will topple traditional social structures.
Aleks Krotoski
The Guardian
Wednesday 5 August 2009
World of Warcraft and its ilk represent the next phase in human social evolution. Seriously: those people who spend their (virtual) lives dressed up like trolls or people with pointy ears, who feel a sense of accomplishment from smacking digital rats around for hours each night – they are creating the new sovereignty, establishing a nation-state that transcends borders, that challenges traditional ideas of governance, that threatens economic structures and upsets power hierarchies. People, the future is in the hands of a bunch of trolls.
Displaying posts 111 - 120 of 160
Recent comments