real all about it…
In 1978, one of the seminal events leading up to the revolt at Tienanmen Square in Beijing was the construction of a ‘Democracy Wall’.
This was a place where daily notices of news and opinion could be posted for all to read.
Think of it as an early text version of the Internet, chinese style.
It is hard for us to remember, but in Mao’s China, access to information was forbidden, so the Democracy Wall was a rather radical step.
Today, Philip Hilven, a very respected journalist from Maastrict writes to me to ask of we can take the ‘1,000 Flipcams in Newark’ (or Gaza) concept to Maastrict.
The idea is to construct a kind of public ‘Democracy Wall’ where the people of Maastrict can ‘post’, (quite literally), their opinions or ideas, in video, in a constantly changing tapestry.
Well, why not?
Although I had thought that the video wall concept was certainly a movable feast – Iraq, Gaza…, I had not thought, until now, that it might also have an appeal to less ‘violent’ places in the world. Like Maasstrich.
But why not?
The wall is, in fact, a physical representation of what is happening in reality – thousands of people with thousands of ideas all coming to gether in a kind of living and fluid tapestry.
Many many years ago, (if my mind has not rotted to much so far), I recall a visit to the IBM Pavillion at the NY World’s Fair in 1965.
Inside, the dominant feature was something called “the People Wall”, and it was a giant wall of real people who were raised to form a ‘wall’, and then watch a film about how computers worked. It was physical people! Here’s a photo from 1965:
Now, we can marry the concept of ‘Democracy Wall” + “People Wall”, and do it through video images.
Amazing.
OK Philip.
Let’s go to Maastricht!
