The Cyberpunk Genre as Social and Technological Analysis

I once taught a Freshman seminar at New York University in Information System Management (ISM). The course was introductory and only two credits, so I felt we needed a focused yet comprehensive set of analytical concepts to shape our discussions and assignments about ISM in the modern world. I decided to use the “cyberpunk” genre […]

Max Headroom’s Futuristic News Gathering

Max Headroom extrapolated some interesting trends in television journalism. Edison was what soon became called a “platypus” reporter, multitasking with a multiple forms of equipment, particularly a rather large camcorder. By the 1980s, TV journalism had switched from using film to electromagnetic video cameras. Film was difficult to transport and had to be developed before editing. Originally developed in the 1950s for television studios, portable video cameras with sufficient quality for electronic news gathering like the Betacam were available by the time Max Headroom was conceived.

Is Cyberpunk Making a Comeback?

Admittedly that sounds quite weak given the “virtual” reality of recent games like Halo or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 not to Second Life or or the military simulations used these days, but it helped sparked imaginations at the time and changed the culture of telecommunications from one dominated by telephone company engineers and Washington DC lawyers to the promise of the web and creative imaginations tech-savvy multimedia designers and entrepreneurs of the 1990s and the zeroes.