Introducing Tony Hall's cunning plan: The BB(&A)C

Tony Hall’s scheme for the BBC’s future has been widely disdained as a willful desire to put the clock back to the days of ‘Auntie’ BBC, but Brian Winston argues it is more like a return to the brilliant deal that acquired the Proms in the ’20s

The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition [review of: Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations by Joshua Malitsky, 2013]

“The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” Joshua Malitsky, Post-revolution nonfiction film: building the Soviet and Cuban Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013)

Let them eat laptops: the limits of technicism

Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Labs 'onlie begeter' and one of digital techonologies most persuasive salespersons, has a new project. With undeniable logic and unimpreachable intentions he wishes every Third World child to be given a laptop. His reasoning is that without education, all other attempts at development are doomed to fail and that since education can be accomplished by computers, the way to make good its grievous failings in the South is with computers. He has therefore developed an elegant device of considerable sophistication but great ease of use – a brightly-coloured, plasticencased clockwork-powered computer which costs (or rather, he promises, will cost) around $100. This contrivence, a toy in appearance but a serious machine in operation, is what he intends to give away in millions and, according to his own publicity, he has already apparently had great success both in persuading Southern governments – Rwanda, Libya, Uraguay – and manufacturers – Quanta Computers -- to back his scheme. Negroponte's website is somewhat coy about how much money the initiative will involve but the budget is clearly in the order of billions: two billion children in the developing world x$100 a machine. Seed money alone -- from the likes of eBay, Google and Norstar, all at $2 million each -- would seem to exceed$12 million

Documentary film

Short history of the development of the film documentar

How does technological development and adoption occur In the media? A cultural determinist model

The thesis hereby submitted, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ was originally published in Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge 1998) and Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute 1996). The argument outlined in those two books is further supported and updated by six other texts published between 1995 and 2005 on the same topic. Media Technology and Society A History: from the telegraph to the Internet deals with the development of electrical and electronic mass media proposing a model for the nature of such developments. It is a final iteration of an approach to this history which has its origins in work first begun in the 1970s. Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television applies the same model to photographic and cinematographic technologies. The thesis argues that all these media developments can only be understood in a social context; that they are to be understood as examples of what has become known as ‘socially shaped technology’ (or, in terms of the thesis, ‘cultural determinism’). This is contrary to the received dominant view that technology itself is the driver determining social formation – termed the ‘technological determinist’, ‘technicist’ or ‘diffusion theory’ approach. In rejecting technicism, ‘How Does Technological Development And Adoption Occur In The Media? A Cultural Determinist Model’ proposes instead an original, pioneering contribution to a revisionist cultural determinist/SST historiography as well as outlining a model to explicate at a theoretical level how such innovations and adoptions occur

Writing the BBC: the perils of historiography

Jean Seaton’s book on BBC in the 70s and 80s has been widely faulted. But is there some intrinsic reason why writing histories of the BBC is so difficult

Traitors or toadies? [The BBC: myth of a public service, by Mills, Tom (Verso, pp266, £16.99)]

From 1934 until 1984 that bastion of journalist integrity, the national treasure that is the BBC, had MI5 vet all editorially sensitive job candidates for possible subversive opinions and connections (for example, in the 1930s, the Relief Committee for Victims of German Fascism). The BBC demanded that the department do this with such enthusiasm that the spooks more than once complained of the workload. Unreliables finished up (as Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor reported in 1988) with “a buff folder with a round red sticker, stamped with the legend SECRET and a symbol which looked like a Christmas tree”. I have never dared ask to see mine – for I cannot face the shame of discovering that I did not merit the Christmas tree. Were it not there, such clear evidence of champagne socialist pretentions would not be bearable. Tom Mills, in The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, puts my fear into properly evidenced context