A few reasons why the Internet is great

Today I spent my day at home, doing some preparation work for my role in this year's production of South Metro Showtime, the local Scout and Guide theatre production I've been involved with for the last 15 years (shameless plug: Aug 20-28 at the Alexander Theatre, tickets on sale now, www.southmetroshowtime.org.au)

While the majority of my years in the show have been spent on-stage, the last few I have helped backstage, mostly in the lighting area. This year, however, I've been made head of department for the newly created Video department, as we are introducing to our bag of tricks two large plasma screens with which to project extra content in addition to the human interaction on stage.

While a couple of pieces of this "non-human content" (as I have dubbed it) are being filmed, the majority of it are images and video either created by myself or the much more talented Matty B, or sourced from the vast repository of media that is the Internet.

While I was pulling all this content together today, it occurred to me; had we been attempting the same thing in my first show 15 years ago (leaving aside the fact that giant plasma screens weren't around then), it would have been much more difficult, as although the Internet existed, it was a vastly different and smaller landscape back then.

Let's review some of the tools I used this afternoon, and whether they were available 15 years ago:

• YouTube (material for background video montages) - created 2005


• Google Images (still images to use as backgrounds) - created 2001


• Google (used to research video conversion and editing methods) - created 1998


• OpenOffice Impress (creating slideshows for background information) - PowerPoint created 1987, OpenOffice created 2000

If you're any good at all at maths, you'll have worked out that only one of those tools was available for my first show in 1996, and that's Powerpoint (and it would have to have been the Microsoft version). And it isn't an Internet tool anyway (although a useful piece of software if you use it properly - I'll save my rant on bad Powerpoint Presentations for another day)

Had I been doing this in 1996, I would have had to film and edit versions of the videos I needed myself, create the images myself (either by hand, or an early version of Corel or Photoshop), and if I needed tips on how to do anything of this, I would have needed to take a trip to my local library and search the catalogue for a relevant reference book. All of which would have taken a lot more than an afternoon and evening.

So my point is, we've come along way in a few short years. The Internet is a great time-saving (or, sometimes, time-wasting!) invention, no doubt one of humanity great technical achievements. Watching some of my Venturers and how connected they are now, I honestly think they would struggle to exist in the same world I grew up in at their age not so long ago!

Incidentally, to find out the dates each of the tools listed above was created, I used Wikipedia, another great invention, created 2001