Update: (8/12/2009) This is how close we are, at the end of 2009, to the 'Slate/Tablet' I was imagining over ten years ago. Waiting for Jobs to come up with his device...
The most stimulating topic coming through my various feeds and streams in the last few weeks has been the 'future of journalism'. Some of my favourite thinkers on media and technology - Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler, Nick Carr, Jeff Jarvis and others - have been pitching into the debate, as the stories mount up of major newspaper enterprises thudding to the ground in the US and UK.
As someone who still writes occasionally for compressed-tree outfits, was once editorially involved in the commercial start-up of a (Scottish) national Sunday newspaper, and who's been surrounded by scruffy journalists since his student days, this subject gets me in the heart and the head. I care about journalism, no matter what medium it appears in - and I want to take a few days (and posts) to dwell on it, both personally and institutionally.
But as the economics of the business go up in flames, ignited by the twin-sparks of the internet and the recession, I wanted to begin by sharing a bit of personal retro-futurism. About 11 years ago, while columnising for the Herald newspaper, I was asked by the then managing editor Gus MacDonald to start up some "game-changing" pages within the Saturday paper. I came up with a think-tank called E2 (short for Second Enlightenment, very Scottish) and a kind of 'Talk of the Town' editorial called Scotgeist (yep).
After eight months of wild free-wheeling (where one executive said, "this is journalism for the 31st century, rather than the 21st"), I was poached to help start the Sunday Herald with Andrew Jaspan. But I'm proud of the legacy. And one project I particularly recall was our two broadsheet pages on "Digitality and the Newspaper", first published in June 8th, 1998. My initial desire was that I could show you the actual pages in crystal clarity from an online PDF - but my only access has been via a microfiche-reader (steampunks, contain yourselves), two b/w A3 photocopies, and some shaky iPhone camera shots as the copies lie on the floor of the Mitchell Library, in weak Glasgow sunlight:
The original text is in extended post below, and it's been a bit of a scream to go back and read my crystal-ball gazing into the future of newspapers. But before I gloss that, let me explain what the right-hand side pictures are. Along with my graphics partner Roy Petrie, this was our smudgy attempt at imagining what a networked news-reading device for 2028 would be - we called it 'The Herald Slate'. I apologise in advance for the cheesy Scottish-speculative editorial on its cover (available below). But apart from the fact that its design anticipates some of the clunkier e-book readers (never mind the new Kindle) I'm fascinated by how much we got right in 1998, in terms of anticipating what needs the device would satisfy, and which what functionalities.
....The Nokia Communicator - a little clam-shell containing a mobile phone and an net-surfable mini PC - is rightly derided as little more than a gimmick by tech writers. But its principle is surely correct.
Modern information workers will not be tied to any one office, will move flexibly between home and work spaces, will require ever more comprehensive means of communication to organise their complex, busy lives. So they will increasingly want to bring the network with them - something popped into their handbag, briefcase or satchel, as useful as a wallet or an umbrella. Whoever brings together the elements of the PC, the Internet, the mobile phone, and the newspaper/database into one object will have created the Model T Ford of digital culture. The Apple Mac will not be the last great leap forward in computer innovation.
....In a world where connections can easily be made between individuals far distant in space and time, it will seem more and more perverse that the world can only be surfed from a fixed point - that is, trapped before an office or domestic PC, frozen into the typists' perch for hours on end.
The newspaper or magazine - in its portability and flexibility, its sheer physical satisfaction as a transmitter of information - will become one of the main design precedents for the new age of personal computers. For the new display technologies will allow people to handle computers like their daily paper, rather than be trapped before them like keyboard slaves. Our tablet or "Slate" is one design answer - a flexible screen, connected to a networked computer equipped with speech recognition, the screen's surface able to function as a touch type keyboard if necessary. But there might well be many other answers.
... In the First World, certainly, this means that our social spaces will be filled by a thick web of perpetually updated, invisibly transmitted information - a data-environment for which personalised tools will undoubtedly be developed. Again, portability and practically will be the competitive advantages - ones which the newspaper/magazine model already exemplifies.
... The prizes will go to those providers of products and services who provide reassurance and a sense of history: those who can make the new information era seem like (in McLuhan's words) an extension of man, rather than a replacement or modification of him. And nothing could seem more traditional than the network computer rendered as a newspaper, or a journal - or even more anciently, as a combination of personal oracle and parchment. In a sense, the more microscopically powerful our information technologies become, the more we should be able to spend our time designing tactile, practical ways to make them livable.
As I'm pasting and writing all this into the window of a blog template on a lap-top (and that's pretty continuous with 1998), I'm looking at my iPhone on the tabletop. Not only does it threaten to become the "Model T Ford" of my digital universe. But it also has a lovely app from the New York Times - which makes all its content available with beautiful clarity in my palm, with adjustable font and e-mail-to-a-friend option (mimimal social tools, but they'll surely get better).
I'll go into the wonderful business-modelling of the post-newspaper gurus above in the next few days. But I have to say that if there's ever been a slam-dunk product waiting to be launched, it's a tablet-sized version of the iPhone/iTouch (here's some fantasizing). Something which gives the ergonomic, haptic and tactile pleasure of an iPhone (as I imagined over a decade ago) but at a physical scale which rewards the reader of newspapers and magazines. There might even be some kind of income stream for established newspaper brands - who could start to think of themselves as more like super-functional apps to be purchased or subscribed-to, than fearful newsrooms who don't want to give too much away to the free commons.
Isn't there a beautiful brand synergy between the big newspapers and the Apple eco-system just waiting to be forged, by the right combination of iNews and iTablet? And can't you see telecoms retailers bundling such a device with the rental income-streams of other devices? Maybe newspapers should be talking to the telcos as well as Apple.
It's not always a good idea to dig up your prognostications. But I'm pretty happy with my late nineties' musings (though I think the future it anticipates is coming about a decade earlier than 2028). As the old dinosaurs of content capitalism thump into the swaps, it's fun to be a little creative mammal, scurrying for long-term survival.
TAKING A SLATE INTO THE FUTURE - FROM DEAD TREES TO LIVE REPORTAGE: DIGITALITY AND THE NEWSPAPER
BY PAT KANE, THE HERALD, 'SCOTGEIST/E2', JUNE 6th 1998
This week, E2 and Scotgeist join forces, and ask you to join us in a bit of "imagineering" about the future of newspapers.
Twenty years ago, no-one had even heard of the internet: now it's regarded as the biggest challenge to newspapers since the advent of television and radio. What challenges will newspapers be facing in 20 years time? And how might they maintain their edge in an increasingly digital culture?
On this page, PAT KANE ponders the relationship between newspapers and the digital age - and suggests that a new form of news medium might well emerge, which will place newspaper values at the heart of progress.
And on the opposite page, ROY PETRIE imagines thirty years into the future - when the best way to read your morning's Herald might not involve getting your hands dirty (but might mean charging up your "digital slate" every morning).
We also aim to enjoy ourselves here: once a month over the next six months, we'll be visiting the future headlines, local news stories, angry letters and unfair reviews of the Herald in 2028 - the year when the XF11 comet was successfully averted, the world heaved a collective sigh of relief, and everybody could start really enjoying the 21st century... -- PK
The HERALD SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 1998 www.e2- herald.com edited by Pat Kane 216th year No 112 page 30
CAN NEWSPAPERS literally seize the digital revolution and make it their own?
PAT KANE envisages a new kind of newspaper rolled under his arm in the next century.
The HERALD NEWSPAPER you're holding in your hands today, as a piece of technology, isn't that different from The Herald of twenty years ago (or even, to be honest, two hundred). More colour pictures, certainly: a brasher, top-page sell of the contents inside; crisper, cleaner lettering - all due to advances in printing systems. But, essentially, it's still sixteen or so large, doubled-over sheets of pulped-wood-and-ink, picked up from newsagents everywhere, and as inert as...well, dead wood. In fact, as a technology for transmitting news, information and opinion, today's Herald (along with, to be fair, every other publication on the shelf) is barely beyond the days of Gutenberg and Caxton.
Yet in these days of info-blitz, where a proliferation of new technologies - cable/satellite, internet, digital media of all kinds - are incessantly grabbing for "mind-share", some could point to the survival of the newspaper with a certain Luddite satisfaction.
Compared to any other media - whether audio, visual or both - the newspaper is still the most democratic and practical information technology.
It doesn't need batteries, special hardware, or a program download to be readable. It can be folded under your arm and taken on the bus, or to the beach, without fear of malfunction. And what it loses in instantaneity over other media - it can't flash up headlines, or cover a running story - it gains in interpretive depth.
The products of television and radio flit past your attention span - and when something catches you, it's usually gone before you can get to a record button. But the well-written and perceptive newspaper article stays with you - because as a reader, you have stayed with it. In a way, you are *forced* to stay with it: the only newspaper equivalent to channel-hopping would entail carrying round a wheelbarrow (or at least a bulging plastic bag) of the day's papers. The physical act of reading is still, as historian Alberto Manguel says, a means of pausing the frantic flow of our lives, of gaining an interior perspective on the chaos of the world. And as all wood-pulp editors are wont to say these days, the newspaper has the opportunity to become more useful to citizens of the information age, rather than less so - providing background and context to the rush of real-time events and images surrounding us.
The half-hour spent leafing through the paper on the morning train, the twenty minutes at lunchtime, the half-hour on the way home, the hour or so on a Saturday or Sunday - these are as near to meditative moments as the modern info-worker gets. And moments that, with a pair of scissors, can be easily returned to at any point in the future.
There's a strong argument to be made that the reading experience provided by the newspaper is one of the most vital and important supports of our civic realm. In a high-tech world growing ever more intangible and immaterial, perhaps the low-tech materiality and substance of the newspaper acts as a kind of portable ballast, renewable every day. When and where else can we truly inform ourselves as citizens, trying to comprehend our society and our place in it, on our own terms and at our own pace, than in front of the newspaper?
Newspapers Uber Alles
THERE are a few alternative answers to that question, of course: broadcast media would make their own claims, and the Internet an even stronger one. And if anyone claims they know exactly how media technology, citizenship and the marketplace will relate to each other over the next twenty years, it's almost a certainty that they don't know at all - such is the rate of change.
But, foolhardily or not, I'd like to make a modest proposal here: The model to which all other media sources will bend themselves - both in terms of software and hardware, content and technology - could easily be the daily newspaper. And rather than newspapers regarding themselves as terminal losers in the battle for eyeballs, they should realise that they have a supreme opportunity to become one of the central gateways into the information age.
We can already measure some progress: twenty years ago, who would have predicted that every newspaper would have its digital, on-line equivalent? Most publications - including this one - are looking at the Net as a useful supplement to their activities in the world of wood-pulp. It can provide readers with an easily accessible archive (free, or on subscription), give them forums for discussion and debate, and connect the paper with a potentially international or global audience.
The most well-resourced American sites are even beginning to break news on the Net - the Louise Woodward and Monica Lewinsky scandals being the most recent examples. Statistics show that most surfers get their news from the sites of established news media. Yet newspapers are beginning to fall behind other news media in this respect. In the last few weeks, I have found myself logging on to BBC Online News - not only to find stories as they are breaking, but to read in-depth backup articles to those stories. This rarely happens in British newspaper sites.
We are already begin to enjoy the fruits of what Roger Fidler calls a "mediamorphosis" - a fusion of media into new forms, driven by public demand. In this instance, internet news combines up-to-the- minute reportage of electronic media, combined with the context and reflection of print media. For anyone sitting before their work-place or domestic terminal, connected to the Net in a reasonably powerful way, seeking out news by this method can feel both empowering and exciting.
US media analysts like Jon Katz of Wired magazine berate traditional newspapers for not realising how a culture of instant electronic information challenges their very premise. It doesn't make them redundant, he holds - but it does require them to change fundamentally. Katz wants newspapers to slash their news pages, and stop delivering news that's ancient history by the time it hits your doorstep. They should concentrate resources on investigative journalism, brilliant columnists/opinionaters, background pieces on major events. They should use their pages as graphic and typographic testing grounds, taking inspiration from magazine and web design. "Oh, and get rid of those newspaper websites", he notes perversely - unless, that is, they're truly committed to a full archive, and a net-wise culture of interactivity.
Katz's comments are intended to provoke, one new media baiting an old one. But Katz confesses that even he, as a fully paid up netizen, likes the classic newspaper moment - "sitting with a coffee, the news in your hand, making it a personal, tactile experience". And even he presumes, strangely, that the wood-pulp-and-ink technology of the basic newspapers - folded sheets of inert dead wood - won't change very much in the future. So that the best that newspapers can do, when faced with the screens of the digital age, will be to play to their limited, pre-digital strengths - which is their usability, their durability, their materiality.
Back To The Future: The "Slate"
IN this, Katz is almost certainly wrong. There are a range of technological developments around at the moment which, if they "mediamorphose", will turn the internet and its computers into something much more like portable daily newspapers, than the fixed, faintly oppressive objects they are at the moment. And when the computer becomes as portable and usable as a newspaper, how will that transform the idea of the newspaper itself?
Before scepticism intrudes, recall this. In 1978, the Internet was merely the elite activity of a few scientists and generals: twenty years later, it's become one of the key infrastructures of our new globalised world. So maybe we can allow ourselves to make the same kind of extrapolation about media technology in 2028: taking some of the more interesting, marginal seeds of change in the present, and growing them into a whole new medium.
There are roughly five current developments, both technological and cultural, that might well fuse into what we're going to call here "The Slate" - the portable digital document which, in 2028, will be the best way to read your morning Herald.
1. Hand-held phone-PC's, in an increasingly mobile society. The Nokia Communicator - a little clam-shell containing a mobile phone and an net-surfable mini PC - is rightly derided as little more than a gimmick by tech writers. But its principle is surely correct.
Modern information workers will not be tied to any one office, will move flexibly between home and work spaces, will require ever more comprehensive means of communication to organise their complex, busy lives. So they will increasingly want to bring the network with them - something popped into their handbag, briefcase or satchel, as useful as a wallet or an umbrella. Whoever brings together the elements of the PC, the Internet, the mobile phone, and the newspaper/database into one object will have created the Model T Ford of digital culture. The Apple Mac will not be the last great leap forward in computer innovation.
2. New computing and display technologies, and the drive to ergonomics. A cursory read of any of the scientific weekly magazines reveals a tremendous effort towards developing newer, more efficient, more durable kinds of computer display technology. The light-emitting polymers discovered by the Cambridge lab a month ago, will enable a computer screen to be coated onto a flexible surface, like a plastic film on a sheet of card. MIT's Media Lab has been working on its "electronic ink" technology for some years - a graphic coating that can be applied to traditional pulped wood, but which then can be programmed to display any content, like the dots on a tv screen. Brought to fruition, these technologies will far extend what liquid- crystal displays have managed up till now - creating interesting cul- de-sacs like Apple's Newton (whose LCD screen users could write on, in their own handwriting, to input information), but enabling the current glut of pocket PCs.
And the forces that will drive these technologies to the marketplace will be that of ergonomics - the whole physical dimension of cyberspace. In a world where connections can easily be made between individuals far distant in space and time, it will seem more and more perverse that the world can only be surfed from a fixed point - that is, trapped before an office or domestic PC, frozen into the typists' perch for hours on end.
The newspaper or magazine - in its portability and flexibility, its sheer physical satisfaction as a transmitter of information - will become one of the main design precedents for the new age of personal computers. For the new display technologies will allow people to handle computers like their daily paper, rather than be trapped before them like keyboard slaves. Our tablet or "Slate" (right hand page) is one design answer - a flexible screen, connected to a networked computer equipped with speech recognition, the screen's surface able to function as a touch type keyboard if necessary. But there might well be many other answers.
3. The Complete Globalization of Bandwidth.The hundreds of low-orbit microwave satellites being set up by major corporations like Microsoft, Teledesic and others will mean that every square inch of the earth will have access to massive data streams, at a reasonably affordable rate. Already, in gadgets like car guidance systems and the "Palm Pilot" beloved of Hollywood executives, the realities of global satellite positioning (or GPS) are feeding into the consumer market, away from the realms of espionage and other military applications. In the First World, certainly, this means that our social spaces will be filled by a thick web of perpetually updated, invisibly transmitted information - a data-environment for which personalised tools will undoubtedly be developed. Again, portability and practically will be the competitive advantages - ones which the newspaper/magazine model already exemplifies .
4. A Net Generation, Scaling Up Media Standards. Twenty years from now, there will be a generation of 25-40 year olds who will simply presume that digital cultures - media surfing, Net searching and socialising, e-mail and mobile telephony - is part of the natural background of their lives. The media products grabbing their attention will be those which extend and enrich that generational experience of connectedness and digitality.
Newspapers and magazines still have the opportunity to be the departure points from which the citizens of 2028 depart on their daily journeys through the info-sphere - and return to, almost as safe ports where the day's haul can be deposited, sifted through, pondered over. Yet as Katz says, that will mean papers playing to their strengths - as collections of intelligent minds, pertinacious investigators, inspiring opinionators and analysts. They will be the gatekeepers, the constant and reliable guides, to the avalanche of information assaulting the citizen of 2028 - and it's this substance that will prove to be the essential worth of the newspaper brand. If the kinds of mobile computing technologies come through as I'm predicting, the New Newspaper will be able to compete with other media for instant news updates - in much the same way as Net newssites like BBC Online or PA News currently do (This is, of course, a situation where a large, horizontally-diverse media group will be a signal advantage for newspapers - feeding in reports from other parts of the organisation, or their syndicated sources).
Editorial rhythyms will then, necessarily, have to speed up - readers will still value papers for the ability of their columnists and journalists to take time out to reflect on the day's events. But it's unlikely that they'll be patient enough to wait till the next morning's edition for the piece to appear on their scroll-screens. Text journalism will always be able to compete with audio-visual journalism: its written nature, as I've said, is its signal intellectual advantage. But it will have to abandon the strict notion of the "morning edition".
There are other aspects of the sensibility of a digital generation that newspapers will have to adapt to. One is that few readers will be satisfied with a story which doesn't allow a variety of jumping- off points to other sites and sources - or doesn't allow access to the paper's own archive, so that the reader (if they wish) can put this story in the context of others. Also, if readers want to read a range of press releases and official statements on a particular subject, they will demand to go straight to them - and be disatisfied with journalism which simply transcribes their content. One thing is certain about the Herald of 2028: its information-age consumers will force its journalists to raise their game considerably.
5. The Need For Continuity and Tradition. Nothing scares people about our expanding info-culture that the lurid post-human rhetoric which often accompanies it. We will all be cyborgs, say the seers - running around with glasses that flash up information, with brain implants that allow us to be effective telepaths. We will bristle with all manner of clothing and appendages - from teledildonics to intelligent prosthetics. We will even have to get used to competing with new kinds of artificial intelligences for our livelihoods. In such a climate, our basic humanity will seem increasingly beleaguered, a mere fleshly appendage to ever-more powerful systems.
In this context, the prizes will go to those providers of products and services who provide reassurance and a sense of history: those who can make the new information era seem like (in McLuhan's words) an extension of man, rather than a replacement or modification of him. And nothing could seem more traditional than the network computer rendered as a newspaper, or a journal - or even more anciently, as a combination of personal oracle and parchment. In a sense, the more microscopically powerful our information technologies become, the more we should be able to spend our time designing tactile, practical ways to make them livable.
SO what do we have at the end of all this speculation, one sunny summer's morning in 2028? Something I'm calling The Slate (Incidentally, I'm borrowing liberally from the designs laid out in the Philips Vision of the Future website - http://www.eur.philips.com/design/vof/vofsite3/vof3main.htm).
A networked, handheld computer, fully telecommunicational (voice and data), with a flexible screen on which a whole range of businesses can concievably be conducted - word-processing, websurfing and e-mailing, personal organising, virtual shopping, television and radio surfing...and, of course, the reading of one's favourite newspaper of choice. The Herald, naturally - purchasable through daily e-commerce or subscription, and providing many of the other services which pass through The Slate.
On the next page is the front page of The Herald on Saturday, June 8th, 2028, slate edition. (The paper has just embarked on a big ad campaign, to boost subscriptions).
On this page, an average day in the life of a scroll user. We hope you enjoy this minor exercise in time-travel .
A DAY WITH THE HERALD SLATE, June 8th 2028
7:00am. Wake-up call. Whine that it's your turn for coffee and croissants in bed.
7:01-7:15am. Take Slate out of its Charger by the side of the bed: touch up the screen, to see the morning's Herald edition. Note the morning headlines, skim your favourite columnists, check out the sports results.
7:16-7:20am. Tell computer your schedule for the day, things to do, people to see: this appears at the corner of your screen, as text, in the "Personal Box". {The Slate also functions as a personal organiser, as well as mobile phone, e-mailer and net surfer.} 7:21-8:20am.
Haul family out of scratchers, get breakfast down them, school- clothe them, shoot the morning breeze as Radio Scotland's Digital Edition burbles in the back ground. The Slate is left in the Charger again, until you leave the house - powering up for the day, and downloading mail, bills, rolling news, and your own "info-menu" for the day. {You subscribe to The Herald every day for a full newspaper service - but also subscribe to a selection of pieces from other papers, on topics of interest to you. You can, of course, switch subscription at any time to rival papers. But it's easier to stay with The Herald:: you know it, like its Scottish tone, have done for years.}
8:30-8.50am. Walk kids to school (you insist). Note that little Scotia is footering with her School-Slate: discover that she hasn't downloaded her homework onto it from the home Centre. Get angry, calm down, tell her you'll pull it out of the house and send it in to her data-desk in Hyndland Primary when you get to work.
9:00-9:20am. Mag-Lev to Edinburgh (five minute delay, quite unusual). Gives you the chance to get wired into The Herald' s right-wing curmudgeon of Establishment Scotland, Pat Kane: conservative, unthinking patriotism at its worst. Pull out the key-strip and fire off an e-mail to him. Twerp. Compulsive, though.
9:35am-12:30pm. Put your Personal Slate in desk charger, pick up Office Slate, talk to office computer for a while, settle down to some data mining. Necessary labour, unfortunately.
12:35-1:20pm. Bring Slate to lunch with colleagues: wish you hadn't (the messages are pilling up on the screen). Somebody downloads a piece from the gossip pages of Nova Scotia magazine into the table top: apparently, Kane's been seen in virtual-karaoke bars, reliving old glories with a body-projector. We laugh, pityingly.
1:25-1:29pm: Suddenly realise that you haven't sorted out the home deliveries yet for next week - and thank heavens you have this damn machine with you. Pick a park bench, log on to Sainsway on the web, touch-tap your choices on the screen, and get back just in time for the Ideas session.
1:30-3:30pm: Usual teleconferencing, holo-demonstrations, grandstanding and posturing, with some usefulness at least coming out of it. Note that some of the more perky, work-a-holic colleagues are bringing their Personal Slates with them into the meeting, using it for business. You've always found that a little polluting - isn't your private Slate your own little gateway into cyberspace, where "You Can Find Your Own Way In The New Century?", as the ads have it? Proof of this when you get back to the desk: Scotia has mailed you her latest project - a drawing of a Viking, with aerials for horns.
3:55pm: Just before Mag-Lev leaves, do a quick Kiosk download to get the latest news for the journey home (it's cheaper than pulling it down from the Sat-Net). Buy an apple, a latte, a bluberry muffin (all no- cal, of course).
4.00pm-4.15pm: Pull out the phones from the Scroll to listen to a live-video feed from SMG News - another parliament stramash in Edinburgh, where First Minister Smith is deploying all her matronly gravitas to ensure that the SEP (Scottish Enterprise Party) isn't able to whip up any more "anti-tax" fever. Doesn't look like she's winning.
5:00pm. Hometime - Slate switched off and dumped in the charger, hug the kids, straight to the garlic crusher and marinating chicken breasts. Time for a little off-line living.
8:00pm. Kids in bed, settle down to some old-style, tree-pulping magazines - Scottish Retro your favourite, thick as a thumbnail, doing a World Cup special this week - focusing on the glorious 1998 campaign, where we came within a whisker...You remember it with a pre-teen tingle, as if it were yesterday. But suddenly your realise that it's bearing last month's electronic ink - the Eighties pop-soul edition. Rest it on the Home Centre data pad, and tell it to deliver the June edition. In a flash, the cover changes: Mark Lambert's ecstatic features fill the page. You have an urge to take scissors to the whole thing, and put it on a wall in the office. But you remember this is the digital age, where bits are alchemical, and trees are sacred objects ...and you can just file transfer the picture to your office slate anyway. You sense a vague loss of some kind. But you take your fingers to the buttons and icons as usual. These are the Immaterial Times, after all.
FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL OF THE HERALD 'SLATE', June 8th, 2028
HERALD FORUM
DEBATING... Too much Scots in Schools / Multi-media pollution / the deconstruction of Scottish welfare...
BERATING... Kane - from radical to reactionary / Over-paid MSP's / Football's lost nobility....
CELEBRATING... Angela Eadie's Oscar success / Reintroducing the Highland Bear / Join In!
Touch Here:
E T H I X She's not real, but she might as well be - she's kind, considerate, loving...But what happens when you don't want to switch your Virtual Girl off? And worse - what if she asks you not to?
JOCK TRANSOM on when that mutual spark becomes more than a flash at the on-switch. PLUS: he's pre-digital - eek! + loving your clone + losing your e-card + robo-maid or human-maid...
THE UNION TRANSLATION FOR ALL All EU citizens are to be given McSoft's latest language-translation software as a free state download from next month, President Blair announced an hour ago in Brussels. The President praised the Parliament for this "far-reaching and public-minded" move. "We keep Europe diverse, but we bring Europe closer together - classic Third Way politics", said the President.
OP-ED CURRIE: PORN-NETS LIKE "A MORAL CANCER": Official i-space is simply being evaded by the porn corporations, claims John McLeod, The Union's Behaviour Commissioner.
SIMPLISSIMA TAKES MILAN: The anti-progress commune seized control of Italy's most industrialized city in yesterday's e-referendums, immediately announcing a four-day municipal holiday.
GLOBAL & OFF-WORLD: GTUC PLAYS HARDBALL: Ricardo Friere, president of the Global Trades Union Congress, rejected the UN/World Business's latest offer on a planetary minimum wage spectrum.
ISLAM REFORMATION SUMMIT: Today's agenda includes non-Western science, a "democracy for Islam", and Hollywood obscenity. OP-ED: SARDAR.
MUSCLE ROT WORRIES MOON AUTHORITIES: Long-term employees at the Lunar Hilton and the Lunar Ana are displaying "terminal physical atrophy", say doctors
THE B L U R
KULTUR 21C The news that American pulserock star Lesley Marinello underwent surgery to change sex for a couple of months has opened a window into a sub-culture for whom gender has become just another fashion accessory. PLUS: Arab Strap back + Gamemeister goes
YOU ONLY LIVE THRICE CONNERY'S BACK ON SCREEN...By Theodore 12, Blur Correspondant Veteran Scottish sex symbol Sean Connery is aiming to prove the traditional maxim that older men make better lovers when he returns to the screen after a five-year absence in 2029 as the male lead in a screen adaptation of Julie Burchill's fifth autobiography, Excess.
The news follows from recent allegations that Connery had helped beat the ravages of time through the controversial technique of "cell reversal" - the bio-process that effectively rewinds a person's cell degeneration by around 30 years. Illegal in the UK, it flourishes among America's celebrity…
SPORT
FITBA: Cyborg scandal still rages at IBM Morton - Manager Burley accused of "engineering" Mega-League victory - Amputations rumoured
BIO-OLYMPICS: 100 m in six seconds - the transhuman ChemoKid does it again in Athens.
OP-ED * PAT KANE: HUNTING DOWN THE GBU. "Prime Minister Cooper has it in her power to track these info-bombers down to their last, fetid lair. Why doesn't she exercise it? Doesn't she want to?" * ZIAUDDIN SARDAR: ALL HAIL THE REFORMATION! "Slowly, surely, one sensible resolution at a time, this Islam Convention is bringing the world's most popular religion into global legitimacy. We should all be rejoicing wildly".
* NICHOLAS CURRIE: BABEL DEMOLISHED. "Using one of these translation machines is like being turned into a robot yourself.
We're parcelling out our precious human intelligence to the digital culture. And they may not give it back".
* JANE MCCORMICK: A PATHETIC FEUD. "It should be a simple matter to divide up an oil-field which nobody wants very much anyway. But it's clear that the power-personalities of Cooper and Sturgeon - and perhaps too many brain-boosters - is turning simple diplomacy into public farce".
POWER AND MONEY
POST-SOFT, 15 YEARS ON: Why the break-up of Microsoft had a mixed legacy, says our Financial A-Life Correspondant, Quantifia GREENTECH STILL ON A BOOM: Scotland leads Europe in Factor-Four technologies, notes Rob Brown. It's due to a nimble state, a smart populace - and the "Adventurers" of the new enterprise generation. MORE...
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