tv

CNN’s innovations & insights

From Joel Kurtzman, Interview with Gary Hamel, Strategy & Business (4th Qtr 1997):

One of the most interesting cases of all is CNN, which “saw at least three things that had already changed in our world that others had not yet put together”: technology changes produced small satellite uplinks that made it possible to report from virtually anywhere; lifestyle changes meant we don’t all get home in time for the six o’clock network news; and regulatory changes allowed cable operators to undermine the monopoly of regional broadcasters.

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TV changes a society … in its image

From “Bhutan and Fiji: The Elusive Influences of Television” in NetFuture #93, quoting The New York Times of 20 May 1999:

Meanwhile, a widely reported study by researchers at the Harvard Medical School documents some changes in Fiji associated with the 1995 introduction of television. These changes have to do with young women’s eating habits and ideals of beauty.

It is traditional in Fiji to compliment someone by saying “you’ve gained weight”. As a New York Times story puts it:

“‘Skinny legs’ is a major insult. And ‘going thin’, the Fijian term for losing a noticeable amount of weight, is considered a worrisome condition.”

But in just the three years from 1995 to 1998, according to the Harvard study, the number of secondary school girls reporting that they had induced vomiting to control weight rose from three percent to twenty-nine percent. In a country where dieting was hardly known and calories were a foreign concept, it now appears that more teenage girls go on diets than in America. “Young girls”, writes the Times reporter, Erica Goode, “dream of looking not like their mothers and aunts, but like the wasp- waisted stars of `Melrose Place’ and `Beverly Hills 90210′”.

“One girl said that her friends ‘change their mood, their hairstyles, so that they can be like those characters’. ‘So in order to be like them, I have to work on myself, exercising, and my eating habits should change.'”

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Secret movies in the Paris underground

From Jon Henley’s “In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema” (The Guardian: 8 September 2004):

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said. …

Members of the force’s sports squad, responsible – among other tasks – for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us." …

There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.

… the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work.

Film noir in the Parisian catacombs. Secret bars and telephones. Scuttling down drains for secret assignations. "Do not try to find us." I’m swooning just thinking about it!

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