Only Connect

It amuses me when technology creates pathways that no-one anticipated when the technology was created. At the simple end of the spectrum, a well-known example is the 3M scientist, struggling to create a super-strong glue, who failed spectacularly and created one that stuck lightly to a surface, but could be easily removed, leaving it unmarked. The glue sat on the shelf for some years before another 3M employee suggested using it for a bookmark that would stick to the page, so not fall out and lose the place. They got funding to develop a prototype - and the Post-It note was born!

A personal favourite is the circular route of mobile communications. Mobile phones initially developed to run their voice calls and apps over the cellular network. Separately, personal computers became linked to the Internet by using pre-existing telephone land-lines - initially connected by a wire and then via a wireless router. Next, mobile phones were enhanced to connect to routers, so that apps could run faster over the Internet-connected land-lines. Then someone developed something called 'Voice Over Internet Protocol' (VOIP) - a method of sending sound over the Internet and holding a two-way conversation, using computers equipped with speaker and microphone. The final link in the chain is quite recent: most mobile phones, when making a voice call, will now switch from using the cell network to using VOIP, if they are connected to a router. So, after 50 years or so of development, I can use my handset to call you for a chat over the phone line, just as I could when I was a child!

There is something of the same flavour about what we are doing here. A play written in 1938, and staged by the National Theatre in 1940, beteeen air-raids. The NT revived the play in 2022 and, as they commonly do, filmed and broadcast it live across the globe during some of the performances, for audiences to see on cinema screens. The cameras at such performances are not entirely static - including, for example, close-ups of the speaking character and panning with movement - so the experience is similar in some ways to watching a film 

These live broadcasts are captured as recordings, and made available by a streaming service called 'NT At Home', that we have signed up for. Most people use a TV to receive the service, but we don't have one, so we plug a projector into a computer and project the image on to a rickety old screen salvaged from business presentations in the 1980s. So we have 'the cinema experience', at home, viewing a play, in 'live' performance two years ago

I've had an exhausting and very muddy day, trying to revitalise the garden pond. Very passive viewing of a play was just the right evening activity. The under-floor heating in the kitchen is drying out some of my work-clothes - probably not the use that the designers of the technology had in mind