Posts Tagged ‘history of the internet’
“I think I’ve created a brand and a business”*…
Independent Studio Services, or ISS as it’s known in Hollywood, is one of the leading prop houses serving the motion picture and film community. Producers rely on it to fit sets with every manor of physical item, each authentically evocative of the scene being shot. Most of those items– from sideboards to side arms– are “commercially-anonymous”… that’s to say, not overtly branded. But increasingly over the last several years, via product placement, branded goods– the Heineken that James Bond drinks in Skyfall, the Coke cups in front of each American Idol judge– are slipping into the spotlight.
Still, there are lots of situations in which producers need a “branded” item that isn’t real:
“We’re trained to see brands, so when you don’t it’s almost jarring,” says Michael Bertolina of ISS. “But the network won’t use a brand if it interferes with an advertising deal they have or if it’s not used for its intended use. So instead of covering it with tape or running into a legal nightmare, we create these brands that are fictional.”
Given the normalcy of brands, prop houses like ISS base their fake products on them. Bertolina says the prop version gets modified to the point where it won’t impede on anyone’s intellectual property, “just like private label cereal boxes versus something from Kellogg’s.” So Leonard on Community reviews “Let’s” instead of Lay’s, or Ben Harmon drinks “Haberkern” on American Horror Story last season instead of Heineken.
“Our owner’s name is Gregg Bilson, so you’ll find Bilson cigarettes all over TV,” Bertolina adds. “If you watched Justified on FX, [Mags Bennett] ran a shop and had a rack of cigarettes behind her head all the time. They’re all Bilson.”
More on brands-that-aren’t at CoCreate.
* “I don’t think I am an actress. I think I’ve created a brand and a business.” – Pamela Anderson
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As we switch to generics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet as we know it, became an actual network. Initial test login characters had been sent on October 29 of that year from a ULCA computer to a computer at SRI in Menlo Park, CA, which were then permanently connected on November 21 through early routers (small packet-switching computers then called Interface Message Processors). With the addition of nodes U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah on this date, the “remote binary” configuration became a true network. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other; today there are over 900 million host computers connected to the internet– and over 2.4 Billion internet users worldwide.
Spinning a (World Wide) Web…
click here for larger, interactive version
In commemoration of Chrome’s birthday, Google enlisted Hyperakt and Vizzuality to create a celebratory chart of the evolution of the internet… The interactive timeline has bunch of nifty features– your correspondent’s fave: clicking a browser icon allows users to see how the browser’s window has changed in each release… a stroll down “memory lay-out,” if not memory lane– and a concrete reminder of the importance of design.
[TotH to the ever-remarkable Flowing Data]
As we resolve yet again to clean out our bookmark cache, we might wish an acerbic Happy Birthday to journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken; he was born on this date in 1880. Mencken is the auuthor of the philological work The American Language, and is remembered for his journalism (e.g., his coverage of the Scopes Trial) and for his cultural criticism (and editorship of American Mercury— published by Alfred Knopf, also born on this date, but 12 years after Mencken ) in which he championed such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson. But “H.L.” is probably most famous for the profusion of pointed one-liners and adages that leavened his work…
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H.L. Mencken, photograph by Carl Van Vechten (source)
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