tuned to a dead channel

[extemporanea]

I do not appear to feel much like blogging at the moment. Right now that's possibly because I have a Horrible Cold In The Head, courtesy of my mother, who also has a Horrible Cold In The Head which she picked up from my niece. Children are plague pits. Fact. Anyway, we're both dragging ourselves around the house gravitating to heat sources (it's

Comments

[rumint]

Great Gibson link thanks. And the subject line makes a good point about tech change and society - the modern reader knows a dead channel is steady blue in this age of cable and satellite, they've never seen grey tv static snow...

[strawberryfrog]

Damn, you beat me to it. Digital receivers show a bright, sky blue when not getting a signal.

[extemporanea]

It's remotely possible that we still get grey static because SABC, or because the damned TV aerial blew over again, but get it we do. On that approximately annual occasion when I actually try to turn on the TV rather than the DVD screen, it's weirdly nostalgic.

[strawberryfrog]

Truly, the past is a foreign country.

[bronchitikat]

Hope your cold goes soon!

[extemporanea]

Thank you, ma'am! Scientific observation reveals that my mother gets colds violently, and then they're over. I get them less violently, and they linger for ages. Still lingering. On the upside, three-day weekend! It'll help.

[pinkthulhu]

1981 is an interesting choice, as that was on the cusp of change (and yet, only 32 years ago!). The first AIDS cases in America were identified in 1981 (it was originally called GRID - Gay-Related Immune Disease). The early internet was based on the standardization of TCP/IP in 1982, and the expansion of the proto-internet, ARPANET, in 1981. I remember the film "WarGames" in 1983, with Matthew Broderick, which I guess introduced the world to the idea of hacking, computer networks, and computers controlling physical sites. The environmental movement has been going since the 19th century, with hydro power being utilised even back in the 1930s, but I guess it's never been as prominent, particularly with regards to the use of clean/renewable energy

[extemporanea]

I darkly suspect William Gibson is a man who really knows his cusps. But I agree, sometimes the apparently trivial changes are actually profound and pervasive in their effect. It's the cigarettes which really give me a period feel in a 70s film - that segment of Cloud Atlas, for example. And the other major one is cellphones. The structure of a detective novel has changed utterly since cellphones. It's also that thing Gibson says in the article - you can predict the tech, but not the use of it. Star Trek had communicators but no Twitter or texting. Weird.

[pinkthulhu]

Also, kinda hard to Twitter when you're dodging enemy Klingon vessels firing at you... ;-)