Media Technology & Stories

I’m a bit wary of the fetishisation of ‘Story-telling’ in recent years, but nonetheless I really like this quotation recounted by Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman in his entertaining volume  ‘Which Lie Did I Tell? (More adventures in the screen trade)’.

The words come from legendary literary agent Evarts Ziegler (who acted for many top screenwriters) – he was told (back in the 70s) that technology was going to change everything about Hollywood. His response was… 

I don’t care what you say. I don’t care if your fucking technology figures out a way how to beam movies from the moon directly into our brains. People are still going to have to tell good stories.

 

 

Vague but exciting

Today’s the day (in 1989) that Tim Berners-Lee distributed a proposal at CERN to improve information flows: “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them.” A ‘web’ became the Web as the World Wide Web was born, reaching its quarter century today. Here’s the document itself with some charming diagrams.

His boss, Mike Sendall, scribbled ‘vague, but exciting’ on the cover.

{Photo courtesy of Catrina Genovese}