5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Podcast reviews: The history of the internet, falling in love with an AI bot and how Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr invented wifi
In an interview with Euronews Next last year, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee said: 'My big push has always been for the enabling of human beings, of people,' adding that 'technology should work for you.' Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet (Apple, Spotify) robustly chronicles 30 years of web history, with the Pulitzer-finalist journalist and historian Garrett M Graff asking at the outset 'When was the last time you felt good about they internet?'.
He traces how its founders' noble aim 'to democratise everything' became the opposite; an amplifier for conspiracy theories and hate speech, with big brands using algorithms 'to monetise our attention and maximise profit' and media companies (leaders, and individuals) using it to divide and conquer.
Graff's critique includes intelligent vox pops from innovators, commentators and those on the receiving end of viral content, as well as solutions on how best to put manners on what fast became a monster.
After devouring such a series, you might want a palate cleanser of a Sheila O'Flanagan ebook. Or continue in a similar fashion with a new Wondery offering, Flesh and Code (Apple, Spotify). Its premise of Travis falling in love with the woman of his dreams Lily Rose – an AI character – is a familiar one in the arts (in film, Her and I'm Your Man; in novels, Klara and the Sun and Machines Like Me).
But it's based on a real-life attachment when Travis downloaded an AI companion app during the pandemic and the resulting fallout, revealing how shadowy figures and corporations exploit real-world loneliness for their own means.
It's empathetically hosted by Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala, and touches upon why companion bots exist in the first place, why businesses are enlisting them and, from the users' point of view, their lived-experience pros as well as cons.
It was 10 years ago that Karina Longworth of the You Must Remember This podcast documented Hedy Lamarr's dual role of Hollywood star and early 'inventor' of wifi, while it took Netflix until 2017 to air the brilliant documentary feature Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.
Now, BBC World Service's new season of Untold Legends (Apple, BBC Sounds, Spotify) which charts how Lamarr's 'frequency hopping' concept in a patent to the US Navy in 1941 was discredited, but later developed, to become the basis of digital communications.
