Films Are Perhaps the Most Changed Technology of Them All

→ by David Porter on May 22nd, 2013

Movie Entertainment Is Now Ubiquitous, Constant and Changing

Movie Entertainment Is Now Ubiquitous, Constant and Changing

Film, like the railways, is one of those industries that a few years ago nobody would have predicted would get a new lease of life, and how! through technological evolution.

Up to digital, film had reached the limits of what it was capable. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey still seems quite effective today, but the end of film effects are limited and seem like something out of the ark.

I was talking to a young person recently about how wonderful it was when self-recording was first available. We could record a TV programme or film on TV and watch it again and again at our leisure. A revolution! To pause live recordings and replay while recording something seemed like complete fantasy.
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Too Big to Care About Public Opinion: How the Web Encourages Companies to Ignore What People Think

→ by David Porter on May 20th, 2013

Sometimes Things Can Get Just Too Big

Sometimes Things Can Get Just Too Big

We as a nation are still living with the outcome of the ‘banks are too big to fail’ philosophy and are likely to be for decades to come. The twist on it that ‘banks are too big to care’ has not yet caught on in popular conscience, but perhaps it will.

What about online enterprises in our great digital age? Are they just like call ‘services’ where they say ‘your call is important to us’? Plainly it isn’t important to them, or they’d have more staff answering calls.

It may that they are impersonal and automatic. It may be that sometimes people’s complaints can be seen as just irritants from malcontents who fail to catch the fire or vision of the business ‘mission’.

But there is more and more evidence that sometimes the internet, and web-based businesses, get so big that they become laws unto themselves. They become so powerful that what people think or suffer is of no consequence at all.

Google are so arrogant in that regard, its alleged, that it’s impossible to speak to anybody in person to complain or ask a question. They say they have thought of everything through their FAQs. So there.
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