Imagining the Internet

Imaginary Worlds

Eric Molinsky

Fiction, Arts, Society & Culture, Science Fiction

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2017

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We were promised flying cars but we got Twitter instead. That's the common complaint against science fiction writers and the visions of the future they presented us in the 20th century. But many sci-fi authors did envision something like the Internet and social media -- and we might be able to learn something about our time from the people who tried to imagine it. Cory Doctorow, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton and Arizona State University professor Ed Finn look at the cyberpunks and their predecessors, and artist Paul St. George talks about why he's fascinated by a Skype-like machine from the Victorian era. Featuring readings by Erik Bergmann.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend
0:05.7	our disbelief.
0:06.7	I'm Eric Balinsky.
0:09.5	In the summer of 2008, I went down to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge to see a work
0:13.6	of art called the Telektroscope.
0:16.6	It looked like an enormous Victorian telescope that had emerged from the ground after tunneling
0:21.8	across the Atlantic.
0:22.8	And when I got to the lens of the front of the telescope, I could see a live feed of
0:27.6	people in London waving back at me.
0:30.9	The artist behind the work was Paul St. George.
0:34.5	So you could say that they were skyping between London and New York, but the emotional response
0:39.9	and the excitement was as if they had encountered a completely new invention.
0:45.9	And as if they were, I think you went there to the Brooklyn end.
0:49.2	I did.
0:50.2	And it didn't even occur to me how I could just go home and do the same thing.
0:54.2	No, no, no.
0:55.2	We're not going, hey, Eric, wow, wow.
0:57.2	You know, it's just, I don't believe it.
1:00.3	Paul is fast-handed by telecommunications, particularly the way that inventions follow
1:04.6	our desires for these things to exist, or at least they used to.
1:09.3	In fact, he says you can go back and look at 19th century cartoons and see fantasies
1:14.0	about technology we have today.
	...

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