Update

This blog will resume soon. In the meantime here's the MIT Technology Review, archive now available.

Story Time

VOICE OVER: My whole life is about the story. When I'm not workin', I like to work. And when I'm not doin' that, I like to kick back with a book and a dame, in that order. So when I heard that the Mad Genius was coming up with new-fangled ways of telling stories, I got the wiggles. His real name's David Kirkpatrick. I found him holed up in an old factory in Plymouth, Mass. His office was all decked out with inspirational quotes on the walls. J.D. Salinger… Joni Mitchell… and a New York Times headline from an article about him.

Reporter Sean Cole looks into MIT's plans to team up with a new movie studio in Massachusetts to create the storytelling technology of the future.

When the trust in DNS went missing...

We need something else.

...DNSSEC is about creating a "chain of trust," adds Ram Mohan, CTO of Afilias, which has been working to help the Public Interest Registry handle its deployment. There are many places where DNSSEC must be switched on in order for the chain of trust to flow unbroken from the user to a website. Once a top-level domain (such as .org or .com) implements DNSSEC, any website under that domain can choose to turn on DNSSEC as well, which is an important link in the chain. Since Internet service providers such as Comcast have started supporting DNSSEC, Mohan says, it's becoming possible for some website visits to fall largely under the protection of DNSSEC.

More from A New Web of Trust in MIT's Technology Review.

MIT & Storytelling

The Center for Future Storytelling will be co-directed by three Media Lab principal investigators: V. Michael Bove Jr., an expert in object-based media and interactive television; LG Associate Professor Cynthia Breazeal, a leader in the field of personal robots and human-robot interaction; and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies.

Kept forgetting to post this.

Literary Man goes 'bally up' about MIT

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.
P. G. Wodehouse

So does Wodehouse's biographer, it seems.

Wake up, folks, storytelling is in peril! To the ramparts of fiction, tale tellers! Seriously, there can be no argument with Kirkpatrick's premise that 'civilisation needs stories as much as it needs wheels, fire and fibre optics'. Where sensible people will part company with him is in his conclusion. At the Centre for Future Storytelling, he says: 'We want to use technology to keep storytelling alive.'

Robert McCrum has a new column to fill.


Perhaps he hasn't heard about e-books, or multiple player online gaming, the slight problems that newspapers are having in print...tipping points even or YouTube? The key word in David Kirkpatrick's quote from MIT is not "storytelling", but "alive". Keeping stories alive will involve some innovations that result directly from technological advances. So why can't MIT investigate? Can't we give the new story a try?


I think we should return to this sentence of McCrum's soon, as well.

Now, if there is one thing about 21st-century culture that has never needed life support, it is our imagination and the means through which we enjoy it - books, cinema and the mass media in all their manifestations.

Robert McCrum wrote last year of blogging that:

...the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing.

I wonder if he has read Simon Cowell's autobiography?
Or, for something really hopeful and interesting about the consumption of storytelling, checked out the collective reading of The Golden Notebook online?


We need our literary folk to get it, just a bit - please?