mandevil 1 day ago

I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.

I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.

1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.

  • ThrowawayR2 1 day ago

    > "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."

    Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.

    Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.

    • JKCalhoun 20 hours ago

      Agree with your comments on Connections 1.

      Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.

    • eesmith 20 hours ago

      I just watched the first episode. The simulated nuclear attack did terrify me.

      That said, his commentary about telecommuting is spot-on. At 39:49 of https://archive.org/details/the-day-the-universe-changed-s01... .

      "The point about all this technological pizazz isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take say what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this you could have telecommuting, that's where you work at home from a screen and you never go into the office.

      Great! No more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses. Or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output?

      Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses. Or to the downtown properties where maybe your pension fund's invested.

      Not to speak of working at home day in and day out and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?

      From just one application of this microchip."

  • jleyank 1 day ago

    Second the comment re the day the universe changed, and found the episode on how Islamic Spain influenced the world quite surprising. Think it was the 2nd one, starting with two competing views of the world from African Roman scholars/clerics.

    Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.

  • throw0101a 1 day ago

    > I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood

    And for Philomena Cunk's various projects…

jdub 1 day ago

I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.

A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:

"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."

I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...

  • hypercube33 23 hours ago

    A fun background show (for those of us with ADHD?) I like to have on is Computer Chronicles - a weekly show that basically documented the weekly history, for the most part, of the evolution of personal computing. It basically starts out as "these things are cool and can run spreadsheets" to evolution into music, the internet, and beyond. Lots of crazy things happen in the 1980s that we're now realizing today like touch, voice, and ai that people kept saying we'd be 2-4 years away from...I guess that is marketing speak for 20-40 years, but it's still seems very relivant to today.

_JamesA_ 1 day ago

I was so lucky to be able to grow up watching quality shows like this. Thank you PBS (and BBC).