NICK BILTON ON MULTITASKING AND MEDIA
/
Nick Bilton, Lead Technology Reporter for The New York Times “Bits” blog, says that digital media has resulted in a "new form of storytelling." Bilton, who is also a designer and user interface specialist, is co-founder of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn, and is current book is titled, I Live in the Future: & Here’s How It Works. [Amazon]
From the PopTech Blog:
“He’s a deep thinker about the future of media,” says Andrew Zolli. “We thought it would be potentially worthwhile for you to see just how far we’ve come, in terms of the media and the internet, so we’d like to show you an actual early report from the early 1980s — one of the first experiments in the space.”
Nick Bilton: Smart Content from PopTech on Vimeo.
We’re shown a video in which a news reporter posits that someday we might sit down to read our morning paper on the computer — “it’s not as far-fetched as it might seem,” the anchorwoman says, and the whole room laughs. We see someone dialing an old-fashioned rotary telephone hooked up to a modem, and the voiceover explains how the newspaper (without pictures, ads, or comics) can be sent through the phone lines into someone’s television set! “We’re not in it to make money,” says someone from the SF Chronicle (which draws some knowing laughter from the room.)“This is only the first step in newspapers over computer,” says the voiceover — someday, he predicts, we might get all of our news via computer! “It takes over two hours to receive the entire text edition of the paper,” adds the anchorwoman. Ah, the 1980s.“I own a home computer,” says Bilton, by way of beginning, and assures us that what he’s going to say is his own work, not the views of the Times. Five things to know about him: first, he works for the Times, doing research visualization. (He’s a Design Integration Editor and User Interface Specialist & Lead Researcher at the New York Times; his job is “exploring and testing technologies that could become commonplace” years from now.)
