Fascinating vision of the Internet age from 1990

This is Hyperland, a BBC2 documentary with Douglas Adams, Tom Baker, Ted Nelson and others, broadcast in 1990 – that’s before the World Wide Web, before DVDs, before digital TV, before the Internet as we know it.

What’s quite remarkable is the amount that it gets right:

• When we browse the Internet, we don’t follow a prescribed narrative path, instead we jump around and switch focus regularly to find out a random fact or branch off into a different topic.
• When watching video footage or listening to an MP3, we can skip to different sections (think DVD chapter menus or podcast position markers). We can click out to related content (think YouTube timelined clickable comments or BBC’s interactive TV “red button”)
• We can create representations of ourselves in the virtual world as we explore and communicate with others, from social website profiles through to Second Life avatars
• We are just beginning to be able to use technology such as Layar or Pocket Universe to augment reality with additional useful information
• The nature of the documentary itself, skipping as it does between items of interest, is an interesting portent of today’s short-attention-span, focus-shifting approach to consuming information.
• It correctly predicts that one of the biggest challenges is the need for a language for “hypertext” (remember this is before HTML was invented).

It even predicts some things we are only just beginning to see, such as interactive storytelling and intelligent software agents.

All in all, well worth 50 minutes of your time if you are interested in changes in technology and media and their effect on society.

I found this today on Russell Davies‘ blog.