I did a guest lecture gig for an Information School class on Saturday. The topic was “online information delivery.”
I started out by talking about my film studies background and how my hobby is thinking about ways in which screenwriters have to deal with the problem of “magic” technology (to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke). I’ve blogged about this before.
The example I always go to is how, in Die Hard, the terrorists can effectively sever the Nakatomi Plaza’s communications by cutting some wires with a chainsaw. Had that movie been set just five years later, the screenwriters would have had to account for cell phones. And, sure enough, in Spike Lee’s Inside Job — a more recent film with similar plot elements to Die Hard — there’s a scene of the hostages tossing their cell phones into a bank robber’s bag at gunpoint. In that film, the issue of “Well, what if someone just doesn’t throw theirs in?” is also dealt with in a fairly graphic manner.
The example I gave in class involved the 1941 film Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Cooper is a stodgy professor holed up in an old house with a group of other stodgy (and much older) professors working on an encyclopedia. It’s a 10-year project and they are doing all the research and all the work themselves. Each is an expert in some field. Gary Cooper realizes his entry on “slang” is outdated, Stanwyck’s tough-talking nightclub singer and gangster moll, Sugarpuss O’Shea, enters, slang problem solved (oh, and she and Cooper fall in love, naturally.) The film’s energy comes from Stanwyck’s “ball of fire” entering the cloistered community of the professors and upsetting their stodgy ways. If I recall, the film never even moves outside the old house.
I compared the film’s main premise of a small group of experts locked in a house producing a “knowledgebase” (to use a trendy term) with that of the Wikipedia model — or the web in general, for that matter. How could Ball of Fire be re-written to account for crowdsourcing? Could it be? Has the Urban Dictionary made slang “experts” such as Sugarpuss O’Shea obsolete? Has the Internet made it impossible for stodgy old professors to be swept away by beautiful young dames?
Discuss.
Comments
I think the general idea of trivia is changing. Time was, trivia was a way for obsessives to brandish their command of a subject. For example, to know Alfred Hitchcock's cameo in "Lifeboat" used to demonstrate that one was either a bona fide Hitchcock fan or had special and perhaps annoying powers of attention.
Accessing that information today is almost effortless. It just took me a few seconds to find
http://www.filmsite.org/hitchcockcameos2.html
A poly sci teacher friend (Tom) had a student who wore a headset in class. Tom told the student he could continue to wear his headset if he could identify what was politically interesting about this recording:
http://www.amazon.com/J-S-Bach-Konzerte-Fur-Klaviere/dp/B000001G6T
The student lost. But, thanks to the Internet, I got the answer pretty quickly. This impressed him. Tom wrote back, "Fess up how long did you work on it?"
I wrote back, "It took about 15 minutes. But don't get too impressed..." and then I explained my Google searching. I concluded, "If speed with search engines counts as smarts I'll take it. But why ain't I rich? Hm."
In any case, the college kid didn't have the Internet in the 80's.
To quote Al Divetta, "What's great about the Internet is that no matter how obsessed you are with a particular subject, there's someone out there who's way worse."
Posted by: Pat McComb | May 18, 2008 1:59 PM