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April 13, 2004
Movies, Memories, and Time Travel
I'm never going to get around to writing full blog entries on these topics, so here's another grab-bag entry chock-full of interesting reading:
- First an article from The San Franciso Chronicle on a DVD player, ClearPlay, soon to be marketed by RCA that will allow viewers to edit out offensive content from movies. The two Stevens (Spielberg and Soderbergh) are naturally quite angry, but apparently when Wal-Mart speaks, manufacturers listen. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. After all, the lawsuit seems to based on the concept that the film is the sole property of the filmmaker, but my fear is that technologies like this DVD player will continue to limit the kinds of films that are made and distributed.
- Second, Douglas Rushkoff's interesting essay on cameraphones. He observes that cameraphones allow "us" (not me because I still don't have a cell phone) to take pictures anytime they want, therefore changing the status of the photograph, specifically in relationship to the creation of photographic memory. He writes: "But that's just the point: it's the photo we happened to capture. Instead of elevating the events in our lives to "memories," as we did in the Kodak era, we are simply grabbing some visual data points or a momentary sensation. The intentionality is gone. And unless the image is spectacular (not in execution, but in its content) we'll trash it without printing" (via Anne).
- And because I'm a time travel junkie, I'll also mention Matt's discussion of timetraveler_00, a "live movie" adapting the story of John Titor, whose writings appeared on the Internet in 2000-2001, in which he claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2036. Not much to add there for now, but because of my book project, I'm always intrigued by time travel hoaxes.
Posted by chuck at April 13, 2004 3:49 PM
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