One of the things that has surprised me over the last few months has been the resurgence of dance in various forms as a staple of the TV entertainment schedules. Not that I’ve actually bothered to watch any of it; having two left feet and an aversion for sequins and modern dance has meant that vast tracts of the viewing schedule have been out of bounds for me recently. When I was a kid I remember watching ‘Come Dancing’ occasionally with my mum – professional dancers doing things with odd sounding names like ‘Rhumbas’ and ‘Tangos’. The only Tango I’ve ever enjoyed fully (including the orange drink) was the one in one of the Addams family films….
It seemed that Dance was taking over from reality TV as a source of programming material, and I after chatting about it with my wife we started to wonder whether we were seeing a modern day and much diluted equivalent of the ‘Dance Marathons’ from the 1930s depression that gave rise to the film ‘They shoot horses, don’t they?‘
The Dance Marathons of the Great Depression were events in which couples competed to see who could dance for the longest – frequently going for over 24 hours. Couples would drop out when they were exhausted, and the lucky winners would walk away with a few hundred or a thousand dollars. The marathons gave people without much hope the opportunity of getting their hands on a lump sum of money that, if not life changing, would certainly keep the wolf from the door for a while. Of course, the possibility of illness or death from exhaustion was always there.
Obviously, we don’t see that sort of thing happen today – but the analogy is rather striking. Both times of recession, both periods in which there was severe cultural and environmental issues (back in the 1930s the political extremism came from the Fascist right and the environmental disasters came not from global warming but from soil erosion problems in the US Midwest). The difference is that today the process is drawn out of weeks and viewed by millions, and, if we include shows like Britain’s Got Talent, has potentially tens of thousands of people who audition and never get to the televised finals.
Will we ever see something like those marathons happen today in the UK? I doubt it; but I wonder how far the various talent and ‘public access’ dance shows like ‘Got To Dance’ will go in the pursuit of audiences? The demise of ‘Big Brother’ may just be a temporary hiccough in the history of reality TV; perhaps the way forward will be a return to the past.
One of my professional interests is in Artificial Intelligence – AI. I think I’ve had an interest in the simulation of human personality by software for as long as I’ve been interested in programming, and have also heard most of the jokes around the subject – particularly those to do with ‘making friends’. 🙂 In fiction, most artificial intelligences that are portrayed have something of an attitude problem; we’ve had HAL in 2001 – insane. The Terminator designed to be homicidal. The Cylons in the new version of Battlestar Galactica and the ‘prequel’ series, Caprica – originally designed as mechanical soldiers and then evolving in to something more human with an initial contempt for their creators. The moral of the story – and it goes all the way back to Frankenstein – is that there are indeed certain areas of computer science and technology where man is not meant to meddle.
Some months ago, an Internet Form that I belonged to was taken offline after an internal dispute….and it never came back. The upshot of it was that the content of the forum was no longer available – gone for good. Of course, it wasn’t all pearls of ever-lasting wisdom, but there was some interesting stuff there that’s now gone forever. A week or so ago, another friend commented on my Facebook profile about the ephemeral nature of a lot of what we put online as ‘User Generated Content’, and it’s quality, and that got me thinking about just how much user generated content is worthy of any form of retention.
Well, the fuss over the launch of the iPad has died down somewhat – it wasn’t the Second Coming or the Rapture, the world didn’t suddenly turn Rainbow coloured (not for me. anyway) and the Apple Fans have gone quiet. So, perhaps it’s time to take a few minutes to think about what the iPad might mean in the future.
Many years ago there was a joke in techy circles that likened Microsoft to the Star Trek aliens ‘The Borg’. It appeared at the time (mid 1990s) that Microosft were indeed determined to assimilate everything they encountered and absorb the technology of other companies in to their own. Well, like the Borg in Trek, Microsoft finally found that they couldn’t assimilate everything.
An item caught my attention recently