One thing that should be analysed when thinking about success of the Olympics is the broadcast. We should remember that for most people, the entire Olympic experience was mediated by the BBC. I think there is general agreement that they did excellent job – at least, a much better performance than during the Jubilee celebrations! This is obviously because it plays to the BBC’s strengths, reporting breaking news as it happened. Listening to the Olympic coverage on Radio 5 Live was not that different from listening to their usual Saturday afternoon coverage of Football League matches – and I mean that as a conpliment. That broadcast team in particular are already very experienced at juggling several outside broadcast units and reporters on location.
The corporation also did a good job at explaining the rules of many of the obscure sports to novice viewers.
Let us not forget that the BBC did have help from the Olympic Broadcast Service. This is a group of international broadcasters who together deliver the actual Olympic coverage (i.e. making sure we see people cross the line, not making sure Clare Balding interviews them afterwards). Apparently the BBC was directly responsible for the rowing coverage, but the athletics was actually project managed by the Finnish broadcasters!
All this coverage was enhanced by some fantastic advances in digital technology. There were under water cameras in the swimming pool, boom cameras sweeping over action in the stadia, and cameras on wires tracking the action from above. There were ultra slow motion replays too, all of which led to an immersive experience.
So, what should we learn from all this? Well, obviously we can hope that TV sports coverage will improve across the board. Many of the clever techniques used during the Olympics should be deployed in other, domestic coverage.
But that is not what interests me. I am more interested in how the BBC (as by far the biggest broadcaster in the UK) can help to facilitate grassroots sport. If we accept the premise that much of the enthusiasm for previously obscure sports has come due to increase broadcast exposure, then the BBC could give those same sports a permanent structural boost by simply devoting more coverage to them all year round.
They can do this in two ways: first they can simply send cameras and reporters to cover major sporting events (they may need to do this anyway, to fill the airtime gaps left in the schedules as Premiership football and other highly popular sporting events are snapped up by Sky, Setanta, and ESPN).
Second, they can also do this by improving their online presence, to allow greater crowd sourcing and audience reporting of sporting events. This would enable them to provide coverage of regional and local sports – not just athletics and gymnastics, but non-league football and youth football as well. This will link the broadcaster’s output with communities and the localities that BBC is meant to serve, and should also inspire greater participation, and more people coming out to spectate. In this way, the Olympic spirit that the BBC generated over the past two weeks may be bottled and disseminated to local sports fields and even schools. Continue reading “How the BBC Could Help Increase Participation in Sports”
The Colour Palette of Children's Programmes
The colour palette for children’s TV is very green, isn’t it?
There are two reasons for this. One, many of the shows are set outside, which encourages kids to play outside too. It is a shame that this is not a given, but there we go.
Second, many of the programmes mix live action with animation. The easiest way to insert a person into a make-believe world, or bring an imaginary character into the real-world, is to use green-screen technology. If there is lots of grass in the set (imaginary or otherwise) it makes the job of the CGI teams easier, and it makes the resulting product better. It’s interesting that this technical requirement should mean that more programmes for kids are set outside.
Continue reading “The Colour Palette of Children's Programmes”
Technological Time Travellers
I’ve just started reading The Information by James Gleick (Fourth Estate). It is about the history of information, writing, and IT, and it won the English PEN Hessel-Tiltman Prize this year.
I was struck by a passage in the book, discussing ‘African Talking Drums’:
Before long, there were people for whom the path of communication technology had lept directly from the talking drum to the mobile phone, skipping over the intermediate stages.
This rang a few bells. First, this nugget from Alain de Botton:
If technology is developing well, what was normal when you were a child should by now seem ridiculous.
Which seems to me to be a variation on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous suggestion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. What’s interesting with regard to the African Talking Drums is that they are seen as a kind of primitive technology, even thought (as The Information explains) the language is so complex it appeared to be a form of magic to the white slavers, colonialists and anthropologists who heard them.
These technological leaps are interesting, I think, because so much of our culture is tied up in technological advancement. It dictates what kind of jobs are necessary and profitable, of course, but also influences design.
I am reminded of Jason Kottke’s posts on Timeline Twins (for example, watching Back to the Future today is like watching Bridge on the River Kwai in 1985, because the gap is 27 years in both cases), and also Human Wormholes and The Great Span (for example, this old man who witnessed the Lincoln Assassination).
It also makes me think of my great-grandfather, who (along with everyone else of his particular generation, I suppose) was alive to hear the news of the Wright Brothers achieving powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, and also to watch the Apollo landings on the moon from 1969-72.
Think finally of the uncontacted tribes of Puapa New Guinea and the Amazon, who must consider the aeroplanes that fly overhead to be magic.
Neal Stephenson Misses a Trick
I’ve just finished REAMDE, Neil Stephenson’s latest tome. It continues his tradition of book titles which look like words from the dictionary, but aren’t, like Cryptonomicon and Anathem. It also continues the welcome trope of being centred around geeky heroes: Lawrence Waterhouse (codebreaker) and Randy Waterhouse (programmer) in Cryptonomicon; Erasmus/Ras, the science-monk in Anathem.
All three books have elements of the thriller genre about them. In all three stories the main characters find themselves forced to trek halfway across the globe (and beyond) to save the world and their own lives. Furthermore, the protagonists use their skills to affect the outcome of their adventure. However, REAMDE compares unfavourably to the other two books, in that these technical skills are secondary to the more worldly talents of gun fighting. It therefore reads much more like a Tom Clancy process thriller, than a book that examines the implications of new ideas and technologies on how we think.
Don’t get me wrong – I love a good Clancy thriller. They’re addictive and enlightening about the way world changing decisions are made, about the quirks of the intelligence communities, and the way in which all global actors (be they terrorists or US Presidents) rely on both a combination of luck and a complex Chain-Of-Events to achieve their aims. However, I’ve always felt that Stephenson operated in a different genre-space to Tom Clancy, and that his work was more interesting for it.
In Cryptonomicon, the heroes are the heroes because of their special talents. Lawrence Waterhouse prevails precisely because of his code breaking abilities. His grandson Randy uses his own skills to break the code left by his grandfather, and thus ‘win’ the day against rogue Chinese military personnel. In Anathem, Ras uses mathematics and science to peel back the secrets of extra-terrestrial invaders.
In REAMDE however, the undoubted technical brilliance of Richard Forthrast (creator of a World of Warcraft style game world, T’Rain) seems tangential to his success. It is the game which gets him into the mess of kidnappings and terrorism, but it plays no part in the reason he overcomes his adversaries. Instead, he wins because he and his confederates know how to work a gun (two of them being special forces trained)… And [SPOILER ALERT] not one but two instances of a wild mountain lion attacking the bad guys at a pivotal moment. Stephenson might be making a point about how nature can intrude on our best laid plans, but if so it is poorly made – nature doesn’t attack the technology, it attacks the guerrilla fighters. It’s just a deus ex machina.
Such a device is particularly irritating in REAMDE, because in the world of T’Rain, Richard Forthrast is himself a “God outside the machine.” He controls Egdod, the first and most powerful avatar in the game world, and (as founder of the game) he also access to the game’s user database, giving details of all the players’ private details, IP address and browsing habits, as well as the powers and inventories of their avatars. It would have been fun if Richard was forced to use (or maybe even sacrifice) Egdod in the game, for some higher purpose. Stephenson should and could have come up with a finale where the winning of the in-game war affected the outcome of the real life predicament. The sequence where Richard does provoke a war between two factions of players in the game (all to inspire renegade Chinese players to log on) should have been the central set piece of the game. Instead, it becomes a sort of by-the-way, dealt with in a few pages.
The fascinating sociological quirks that Stephenson introduces early in the novel – an unexpected conflict between two factions of players (the Earthtone Coalition versus the Forces of Brightness) – are simply dumped, in favour of a (literally) pedestrian hundred pages, dedicated to describing the terrorists trek accross the Canadian-US border. At one point, a promising passage likens Richard’s real life predicament of wandering through the forest on foot, to his avatar Egdod doing the same thing on T’Rain. That parallel, between a physical and virtual self, seems to me to be one of the crucial concepts of the twenty-first century, but Stephenson uses the smilie as a poetic aside, not the kernel of the book.
The neglect of T’Rain in the latter half of the novel is doubly annoying because it squanders some of the more interesting characters. Marlon and Csongor are two variations on the New International Geek. The first is the Chinese creator of the eponymous REAMDE virus that plagues the T’Rain players. The second is a Hungarian sysadmin for the Russian mob and an erstwhile credit card fraudster. Their moment of glory, where they extract a few million dollars from the game world, while sitting in a Manilla Internet cafe at 3am, comes and goes so quickly a drowsy reader could miss it.
This extraction is to my mind the most important scene of the book. It carries within it ideas about the money that we in ‘The West’ spend on play, and the way in which our global connectivity shrinks the physical space. Money can be channelled from one side of the planet to the other, just as the computer avatars in T’Rain use wormholes (or ley lines) to pop out on the other side of their virtual world. It is interesting that Marlon uses the cash to hire a private jet, which spirits him and Csongor from the Philippines to the USA (there is much talk of private air travel and ‘great circles’ in REAMDE, which are not unlike T’Rain’s virtual ley-lines). However, Marlon and Csongor’s arrival in the USA seems less than essential. When they do get to America, they just sit around for a bit and then crash a camper van, while doing little to help the other protagonists. I would rather have had them hunched over their laptops in disparate locations, connected via some VPN, winning the day in the virtual space, to genuinely help the prospects of their allies in the real world.
The use of the virtual world of T’Rain as a planet sized Macguffin is thirdly disappointing because REAMDE otherwise draws together many of the ideas of Stephenson’s other books. In 1992 he introduced the idea of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playimg Game (MMORPG) in Snowcrash, years before the effects of Moore’s Law enabled Second Life or World of Warcraft. Cryptonomicon, and his seventeenth century triology The Baroque Cycle, all look at the nature of global commerce and the basing of currency on gold you can dig from the ground. It grates that although these ideas are revisited in REAMDE, they are not properly explored and no conclusions are drawn.
Any writing on REAMDE must inevitably cite Cory Doctorow’s For The Win. This story also takes place across continents, but with the characters linked to one another through MPORPGs. Doctorow’s writing is generally less conventionally literary than Stephenson’s, but in dealing with the implications of the idea at hand, I think For The Win trumps REAMDE. In Doctorow’s book, the band of protagonists form an international union of online gold-farmers, and beat the system by altering their in-game behaviour. They still encounter real world tests and violence, but they ultimately prevail because of how they use the new technology — Precisely the element I missed in Stephenson’s book.
Continue reading “Neal Stephenson Misses a Trick”How the Depiction of Technology in #Sherlock Captures the Zeitgeist
In a paywalled Times article this time last week, Hugo Rifkind highlighted our loss of the communal Christmas TV moment. EastEnders can never achieve the dizzy ratings heights of the 1980s, Eric and Ernie are dead, and even the numbers for Her Majesty The Queen’s Christmas message are in decline. Rifkind blames the spread of new viewing technologies as the cause of this: A plethora of channels; asynchronous viewing options like Sky+, TiVo, and iPlayer; and the alternatives presented by DVDs and YouTube.
It is interesting that despite this decline, new technology can provide a facsimile of the old, communal TV viewing experience. Instead of discussing an episode over the water-cooler or at the school gates the following morning, we all have a ‘second screen’ and discuss it in real time over Twitter. This is not a particularly original observation, but I mention it because it is Twitter that tells me just how universally popular is Sherlock, the second series of which began last weekend, with Episode 2 to be aired later this evening.
Hilariously, given the above paragraph, I did not actually watch the first episode ‘live’ – instead I caught up later in the week via iPlayer. That doesn’t detract from how popular the show seems to be, at least among the connected Twitterati.
There are plenty of explanations for the success. The writing is excellent and funny. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch exudes an autistic confidence that is true to Conan Doyle’s original character. Mysteries and puzzles are always the most popular stories (c.f. the perennial dominance of detective stories over Lit Fic) and the Sherlock series adheres to the rules of a good detective story, presenting all the clues to the audience as they are presented to the sleuth himself.
However, I think it is the representation of technology, and the visual choices inspired by technology, which make the thing feel so contemporary. Holmes receives text messages and interacts with Lestrade on a mobile phone. Dr Watson has a blog, and the villainess of Series 2, Ep. 1 had her own Twitter account (both of which, as is obligatory these days, also exist in the real world and keep up the conceit). However, it is not just that the characters use technology that makes the show interesting, but how the director integrates that into the visual style. Sherlock employs the popular technique of overlaying motion graphics onto the action. It is method made easy by new digital editing tools (see the opening scene of Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell for an ostentatious example of the genre, as is Fifty Nine Productions’ work in Two Boys at the ENO). In Sherlock, the subtle use of this style makes the technology seem fully integrated into the way the characters view the world. The text messages flow past and through Sherlock, he barely has to look at his handset. I think it mirrors the way most of us live, with our eyes flitting between the screen and reality so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to remember how exactly a particular piece of information came to us. It certainly represents the way a large audience segment are experiencing the show. Are they watching Sherlock, or are they watching #Sherlock? Both.