Content Evolves

By Dan Forbush

MY OLYMPIA SM3

After graduating from college in 1975, I felt fortunate to land a job as manager of the Union College news bureau. I started my career in academic public relations on an Olympia SM3.

We pounded the keys hard in those days, line by line, throwing the carriage back to the start of the line when the machine went "ding." Every few months, we'd have to change the ribbon, which always was a bit of a chore. It required placing the two metal spools in their respective positions and coaxing the ribbon into the channel so the keys could slam against it.

As much as I liked my Olympia, I was delighted in my next job to graduate to an IBM Selectric II. In 1982, I achieved the ability to cut and paste on my KayPro II with its floppy discs.  At Syracuse University, I upgraded to a stodgy IBM PC. At SUNY Stony Brook, I enjoyed moving to a more capable Macintosh, on which for the first time I was able to place a photo on a page.

MY KAYPRO II

Email on CompuServe and the Internet arrived in the early 1990s. Netscape introduced us to the World Wide Web in 1995.

With the arrival of Basecamp in 2014, writing became fully collaborative, giving whole groups of us the ability to work together on hyperlinked wiki pages. When the pandemic forced everyone into Zoom, we achieved the ability to record interviews simultaneously with multiple experts and transcribe these conversations in minutes with Trint.

We discovered we could "mine" the knowledge of experts with great efficiency, especially when we supplement our interviews with articles and book chapters that experts permit us to import via iPhone’s “Live Text” OCR feature. 

Now our writing is going geographic. Spatial. GPS-triggered. Working with the First Wilderness Story Collaboration, we’re developing three audio tours on an advanced GPS platform called STQRY. We describe that project here.

And, of course, we can now freely call on ChatGPT for some collaborative artificial word-smithing. That’s opening a new world indeed, as we’re exploring in Darwin’s Edge, our scenario beginning in 2031.