Thursday, January 05, 2017

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

I can remember a time before the World Wide Web became big.  When I was a child, we had connected computers.  Those that knew enough about computers could directly dial another computer for information, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that we started getting those AOL and CompuServe discs.  Suddenly, everyone and their pet Chihuahua had a Web site.  Nearly every national brand has a Web site.  (I remember bemoaning the fact that anyone could have a blog.  Now, here I am with one.)

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World goes into the early stages of the Internet, before we even had the World Wide Web.  The idea was to be able to share information easily between scientists.  The movie doesn’t go into detail.  We start with Leonard Kleinrock explaining the first attempt at communication between computers.  We even get to see one of the first computers.  From there, the movie deals with other topics like privacy issues and security.

The movie is about one and half hours and is split into 10 chapters.  Each one doesn’t take too long and doesn’t go in to that much depth.  There’s nothing on the commercial aspect.  There’s nothing on eBay or search engines.  There isn’t even that much on the history other than the very beginning.  I’m sure that documentaries have been made already on some of the various subjects.  If I wanted to find something on the history of the Internet or security, I’m sure I could find stuff.  This documentary is probably meant more as an overview.  It’s just a way of showing a few aspects of the Internet.

I’ve always wondered if those involved in creating the Internet and the World Wide Web knew what they were creating.  Did they know that we’d have pictures of cats plastered all over the place?  Could they have foreseen Amazon and eBay?  (I still find it somewhat amusing that you can get a Pound-O-Dice.)   Email was an early aspect of the Internet, but we now have Google Maps.   Here I am posting a review on the Internet about a movie pertaining to the Internet that I watched via the Internet.

The Internet is almost like Frankenstein’s monster.  It is a force to be reckoned with and could go either way.  It seems ot scare a lot of people, but isn’t really that bad.  The Internet has changed a lot of aspects of our lives.  I remember having a conversation with a manager.  He was saying how maps were becoming irrelevant because of GPS.  Mapmakers won’t be out of a job. Their product will just look different.  The same goes for newspapers.  We’ll still want news.  The question is if they can adapt to a digital format.


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