Charles and Ray Eames: A Communication Primer

The Eames’ showed that films could be approached as a design exercise and as such were the forerunners to much of today’s information design, which has had a resurgence as a result of the Web. Their best known piece is Powers of Ten, but this is another little beauty.

The film is nicely self-referential since it deals with Shannon’s information theory. However, the astounding thing is that the Eames’ were savvy about Shannon’s groundbreaking work which was published only 5 years before. To put this in context, its as if Frank Lloyd Wright had written a book about Einstein’s Special Relativity in 1910, when it wasn’t fully endorsed by the physics community.

Via Kottke Via Infosthetics

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Hoover Dam

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Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press

Stephen Fry is a supreme technophile with the aura of a bookish technophobe. There is nobody better to present a documentary about early printing technology and how it changed the world. Great stuff – this is the first of six chunks.
via Kottke

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The BBS Documentary – Part 1 – Baud

The BBS Documentary – Part 1 – Baud

Part 1 of what looks like a great documentary series about the Balkanized version of online existence before the Internet took hold. As one of the interviewees points out, people seem to think the Internet came out of nowhere rather than being evolutionary. In the same way, people think that the web created the explosive growth in the Internet, but actually things picked up a year or so before, opening up the evolutionary niche for something like the web to thrive. For that reason, understanding the history of Bulletin Board Systems, through a documentary like this, is the only way to understand the history of the Internet in its proper context.

As an aside, the Altair 8800, pictured, was the computer I used (or rather avoided using) at high school.

jason scott 38 min 19 sec Jan 13, 2007 www.bbsdocumentary.com

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Steve Jobs: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Playwrights and poets currently garner more cultural prestige than innovative computer makers, but this may be partly because the present rarely has the prestige of the past even if the here and now is where great art is born. The most prestigious art form of Ancient Greece was Lyre playing, hardly a venerated activity now.

I would argue that in a hundred years people will not have heard of most of the people that cover the arts sections of the broadsheets, but that Steve Jobs will be remembered not just as an industrialist, but as a cultural innovator – an artist.

Jobs is considered sartorially elegant, yet he dresses from the waist down in high waisted, beltless, over-length, bleached jeans and sneakers – like an average suburban mall shopper. He is though of as a great speaker, but his delivery is sometimes horribly rehearsed and his voice thin and nasal. But, listen to this speech from when he had just recovered from cancer, it is a masterpiece. For me this is the thing above all others, to show people who don’t get what all the fuss is about when he speaks at a tawdry trade show, tomorrow at the Moscone Center, and people cover it like it was the sermon on the mount.

Link

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The Sex Blog Girls

I’m hesitant to post this, since the title makes it sound like link bait. Similarly, I’m not really interested in the subject matter itself for exactly the same reason i.e. this is the TV equivalent of link bait. That said, on a meta level, its entertaining enough to blog about watching a documentary about blogging.

In other words, this is voyeurism – and not because of the sex.
47 min 45 sec Dec 20, 2007

Link

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Jeremy Clarkson – The Century of Speed

BBC
28 min 18 sec – Aug 16, 2007

Link

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Hubble – 15 Years of Discovery

The object that has revealed more mystery than any other.

Running time: 1 hour 22 mins.

Full screen

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Norman Mailer and Marshall Mcluhan

Two intellectual giants debate violence, alienation and the electronic media in 1968.

Running time: 28 mins.

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Teens Hooked on Pron

A ground breaking documentary on the effects of Internet Pron on Teenagers.

Running time: 56 mins.

Full Screen

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