Mar
The Virtual Revolution on the BBC
Filed Under (General) by elearning4bradford on 26-03-2010
Is the Internet overloading our brain?
I have very much enjoyed the BBC World Service’s – Virtual Revolution series which was run throughout March, the blurb for the first episode outlines it well “Since its birth almost twenty years ago, the World Wide Web has transformed our world : A quarter of the planet is now online and able as never before to communicate, publish, and garner information seemingly without limits. But will the Web’s empowerment of ordinary people endure? As part of the BBC’s internet season, the computer expert Doctor Aleks Krotoski starts her four part series by documenting the Web’s remarkable growth and asking if the old hierarchies it challenges are managing to stage a counter revolution.”
In this first episode one of the interesting ironies of the piece about Napster was the rock band Metallica’s vociferous insistence that the copyright of musicians should be upheld. This irony was not lost on Sean Cannon, singer with the 40 year old Irish folk group the Dubliners who I saw playing at the Lowry in Salford last Sunday. Sean introduced one of their signature tunes in a typical way: “Here’s a song we found on YouTube – by a band called Metallica – its called “Whiskey In The Jar”. This got a huge laugh from the audience – the irony of course was that it was the Dubliners who 30 years ago recorded the original version of “Whiskey in the Jar” which they gave to a band called Thin Lizzy from whom Metallica had ‘borrowed’ the tune – copyright eh, it such a personal thing !
