The web is finally old enough and important enough that someone has made a ‘landmark’ documentary series about it.
The Virtual Revolution starts tonight on BBC Two and “charts two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web, weighing up the huge benefits and the unforeseen downsides”.
This really will be a must-watch for web obsessives. In the first episode alone presenter Dr Aleks Krotoski meets Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, online news maverick Arianna Huffington, YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, and the father of the web, Tim Berners Lee.
Future episodes feature other major internet names like Twitter’s Biz Stone and Google’s in-house ‘Chief Internet Evangelist’ Vint Cerf.
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In an unusual move, the series was created collaboratively with the public. The programme’s website was online before production had begun, meaning that there was a space for the audience to discuss the themes behind the series and help shape exactly what was covered.
In a move that built on another BBC initiative which we covered last year, clips from the programme were made available for users to download and re-edit to create their own version of the programme.
Virtual Revolution starts at 8.30pm tonight, Saturday 30 January, on BBC Two and runs for four weeks. You’ll be able to find each episode on the BBC iPlayer for a week after transmission. Here’s a teaser for the show…
As a bonus, here’s what media remixing legend Cassetteboy did to clips of the show:
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