The MsBehaviour Files : Will Work for Bandwidth
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Remembering the world before broadband is like looking at photographs of times past. The smiles seem stiff and the colour a sepia toned mask. Compared to the rich, connected world I now live in, The Time Before seems dull and very distant. Bandwidth has brought me friends, a home or two, a husband, and a rewarding creative career. I get to live in beautiful New Zealand, and maintain an international profile doing work I love. Remembering the world before broadband is like looking at photographs of times past. The smiles seem stiff and the colour a sepia toned mask. Compared to the rich, connected world I now live in, The Time Before seems dull and very distant. Bandwidth has brought me friends, a home or two, a husband, and a rewarding creative career. I get to live in beautiful New Zealand, and maintain an international profile doing work I love.In the past week I have helped a Berkeley University professor find a new tool for his digital media class. I have taken part in a conference call with Beijing, and built a website for ALT TV's new stream through the magic of open source. Soon I will be broadcasting my own TV show made in a garage in West Auckland. None of this would be possible without that essential to creative geek life which is fast broadband
access to the internet.
I started my online adventures back around 1994, when a friend invited me to a cyberspace workshop. My first dial account was on a lowly 2880 bps modem, but then I found a dream job as training manager at a UK Cybercafe & Internet Service Provider. I was in broadband heaven and stayed there for a few years, until I left the UK to live in New Zealand at the end of 2001. Suddenly I was living in a forest on the end of a modem line, that was too far away from a digital exchange to run at full speed. I creaked along at 3300 bps while trying to run an international website and global community, MB files that my European colleagues sent me, were crashing my mail system. Faster bandwidth was one of the reasons I sold my house to move to Waitakere, before starting a digital company.
It took until 2008 before I finally have what I consider to be Real Broadband at our studios, with decent upload speed as well as fast downloads. Now I can run my own radio stream with music from our label, and spread our videos around the planet. I can upload up to an hour of TV a day, when before I would have been lucky to have managed 15 minutes on our old 'Broadband' plan.
We're still some way away from having everyone on fully Naked DSL which has nothing to do with the porn industry. Some internet service providers let you online without being tied to an expensive landline phone just for internet access.
Broadband is the conduit for the Creative & Information Age, as roads and railways were to the Industrial Age. With better broadband speeds and more enlightened work practices, we won't need to build more roads or move around in cars as much as we do right now. We also need to embrace disruptive technologies like Bittorrent more fully. Despite what the music and film business says, it's an extremely efficient system for artists to gain a new audience. The hostile reaction by the music & film industries is clouding the positive aspects of Peer to Peer (P2P) networking and distribution systems. Efficiency gains at the same time as improving infrastructure is like earning digital compound interest.
We need a neutral internet, with fast, stable bandwidth to compute in the Cloud, and use the Web 2.O Tools that I write about in my MsBehaviour Files. If you're a Kiwi then visit the Digital Strategy Wiki to participate in some open government, and help co-write New Zealand's Draft Digital Strategy 2.0.
The focus is on connection, confidence, content and now collaboration, which after all is what is underpinning the whole Web 2.0 movement. Collaborative clusters and social networks are redefining business and indeed society.
The Wiki is open until 12th May 2008 so why not become a digital enabler and online instigator by joining in the debate?
Related article: Have your say on the NZ Digital Strategy
As well as being TBI's strategist, Helen Baxter a.k.a. MsBehaviour runs dance-music label TMet Recordings, 3D animation company Mohawk Media and has a fortnightly slot on National Radio called 'Virtual World'.
01/05/08