I’ve been researching some stuff online about the history of the BBC.
Now of course, I’ve gone throught the excellent series of books by Lord Asa Briggs (long, but thoroughly readable and highly recommended)… or at least, I’ve gone through the first four volumes. The Auckland Public Library doesn’t have the fifth volume (I have stamped my foot about this), and I’m yet to go rummage in the AUT library.
Anyway, as often happens when you look at things online, you tend to go down unexpected paths and little narrow byways that lead you to interesting things you wish you had stumbled upon a couple of years earlier.
The intertextuality of the WWW – a space I used to call a land of signposts with no destinations, but which is actually a land of cryptic signposts and hidden destinations – reveals some pleasant stopovers if you just keep travelling. There’s some good stuff to be found, and very little that will helpfully direct you to it (see note below*).
There is, for example, an excellent piece by David Lloyd – head of Britain’s Channel 4 news – who came to New Zealand under the wing of Ross Armstrong (not literally – you know what I mean) to examine the possibility of restoring a public service culture to a commercial broadcasting environment.
History has subsequently been unkind to Ross Armstrong, but the article itself is fascinating – and part of a broader site that I intend to spend quite some time reading.
Could nobody have sent me a memo? Where are these intelligent agents we’ve been promised? I have a computer that can deal with bigger, faster and more impressive all-singing, all-dancing multimedia files than ever… and yet I still come across actual content two and a half years late.
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*A quick disclaimer:
Normally, I try and avoid navigation metaphors when writing about the web for the simple reason that they’re overused and inaccurate (“Where do you want to go today?” Well, all sorts of places actually, but instead, I’m going to sit on my arse in my downstairs room, staring at a screen and clicking on a mouse). I apologise – sometimes they’re just unavoidable.
I blame John Perry Barlow’s frontier mentality. Hell, even Netscape have dumped the word ‘Navigator’. They just make a browser these days.
