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The new seekers

David Jennings

Wednesday, 10th October 2007

David Jennings says that Web 2.0 will enrich our cultural lives immeasurably.

In Version 2.0 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a ‘preferred customer’ gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon.

Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you’ve found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need.

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Brutal truth

Marcus Berkmann

Personally, I felt inclined to blame it on the boogie.

Omega watch

Andrew Lambirth

Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913–19
Courtauld Institute, until 20 September

A curate’s cornucopia

James Walton

Was television in Seventies Britain that good? Is today’s better? James Walton investigates

Poor old thing

James Delingpole

On the Saturday night of Glastonbury festival I wasn’t off my face in a field listening to some banging techno, but at the Museum of Garden History watching the noted harpsichordist William Christie and two marvellous sopranos perform songs by Purcell.

Going digital

Kate Chisholm

There was much talk (or you could say waffle) about expenses, salaries and the Ross/Brand affair when Steve Hewlett interviewed the BBC’s DG, Mark Thompson, for The Media Show last week (Radio Four).

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

Mark Earls

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes

Domestic conflict

Lloyd Evans

The Winter’s Tale
Old Vic

Phèdre
Lyttelton

Only a mediaevalist can understand the present

Dan Jones

Dan Jones says that our own era of disease, superstition, disorder and economic chaos is best explained by those who understand the Middle Ages

History isn’t just about bodice-ripping, you know

Kate Williams

Kate Williams, author of a book on the young Victoria, welcomes the new film on the early life of the queen, but says historical cinema should portray politics as well as romance