EPIC 2014
Encyclopedia
EPIC 2014 is a Flash movie released in November 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson with original music by Aaron McLeran. It was based on a presentation they gave at the Poynter Institute
in the spring of that year. The movie is 8 minutes long and is licensed under a Creative Commons
non-commercial license.
The movie is presented from the viewpoint of a fictional "Museum of Media History" in the year 2014. It explores the effects that the convergence of popular News aggregators, such as Google News
, with other Web 2.0
technologies like blogging, social networking and user participation may have on journalism
and society at large in a hypothesized future. The film popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy
and copyright
issues raised in this scenario.
' A Tale of Two Cities
, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
invents the World Wide Web.
In 1994, Amazon.com
is launched. It is a store that sells everything, personalized for its users, that can even offer suggestions.
In 1998, Google
is unleashed by two Stanford University
students, promising a faster, more effective way to search.
In 1999, Blogger is founded. Google comes out with Google News
, a service unique in that it requires no human intervention.
In 2002, Friendster
is released.
In 2003, Google buys Blogger.
In 2004, the rise of Gmail
gives competition to Microsoft
's Hotmail
. Microsoft's Newsbot comes as a response to Google News. Picasa
and A9
are also released this year. In August, Google goes public, acquires Keyhole (now Google Earth)
, a company that maps the world, and begins digitizing and indexing world libraries. Reason Magazine sends its subscribers satellite photos of their homes, with information tailored to them inside.
From this point EPIC passes into the realm of fiction.
In 2005, Microsoft buys Friendster in response to Google's action. Apple Computer
comes out with WifiPod, which allows users to "send and receive messages on the go". Then, Google unveils the Google Grid, a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.
In 2007, Microsoft Newsbotster, a social news network, ranks and sorts news. It allows everyone to comment on what they see.
In 2008, Google and Amazon merge to form Googlezon. Google supplies Google Grid, Amazon supplies their personalized recommendations. Googlezon is a system that automatically searches all content sources and splices together stories to cater to the interests of each individual user.
When explaining how Googlezon profiles its users, the identification card of a man named Winston Smith
appears on screen. Smith is the main character in George Orwell
's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
, in which a dystopian society
is ruled by a media-distorting government. The photograph on the identification card depicts Robin Sloan.
In 2010, the news wars rage between Microsoft and Googlezon. These "News Wars of 2010" are notable in that they involve no actual news organizations.
In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate
awakens to make its first and final stand. The New York Times sues Googlezon, "claiming the fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law", but the Supreme Court
rules in favor of Googlezon.
In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. The word "EPIC" is an amalgam of three fundamental physical and mathematical constants; e
(Euler's number), pi
(π) and c
(the speed of light in a vacuum). These are depicted in the shadow of the EPIC logo.
EPIC stores and categorizes not only news, but the demographics, political beliefs, and consumption habits of every user. At its best, EPIC is "a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before ... but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue." EPIC is so popular that it triggers the downfall of the New York Times, which goes offline and becomes "a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly."
It must also be noted that the narrative follows the epic format, with the clashing of antagonistic entities, conquests and retreats, a concern for genealogy, and the central moral question, often rough and binary but also thrilling, of good vs. evil.
The narration ends with the statement: "Perhaps there was another way."
. Sloan showed the transcript to Thompson, which, after much discussion and brainstorming, led to, "a very different interpretation of what Nisenholtz was talking about." After some back and forth discussion while on a trip to Miami, Florida
, Sloan and Thompson pondered Nisenholtz's original point when he mentioned the game Ultima Online
and put it into the context of journalism
. They soon agreed that it is the most advanced example of a medium people create by merely participating in it. The game, Ultima Online, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game
. As people play, they add to all the other players' experiences of the game, altering the whole fabric of the medium through their interactions with it. They wondered, "what if you could apply that model to journalism?" What if individuals could create and affect news stories simply by reading, viewing, and/or listening to them?
After their trip to Miami, Sloan and Thompson began assembling their ideas. They organized a powerpoint project, titled, The Miami Project, and began a series of presentations in their local offices at the Poynter Institute. Their colleagues were interested yet unenthusiastic about the project. In the spring of 2004, while preparing for an annual Online Leaders seminar at the Institute, they were asked to present it again. This time, they decided to present the story from the perspective of the future, as if it had already happened. They assembled the first version of the film late one night in Poynter's visual journalism lab, on a iMac G4
running Final Cut Pro
. The narrative was met with enthusiasm by the conference participants, and they soon began revising and polishing their presentation, this time using Macromedia Flash
. They kept presenting it, introducing the film dramatically – gliding into rooms wearing tin foil hats. They always followed the movie with the question: "If this is what the year 2014 looks like, what are you going to do today to make sure your news organization doesn't get sidelined? How do you make sure you can play in this environment?"
As the summer passed on, they thought of future plans for EPIC 2014, including a possible website with an interactive timeline and blog
. Though these never materialized, and Sloan and Thompson eventually moved on to new positions, Thompson at the Fresno Bee
, and Sloan at the Current
.
Finally, by the third week of November, 2004, they decided to just post the film. They posted it to three blogs: Convergence Chaser, Snarkmarket, and Jason Kottke's popular blog. They never intended it to become as widespread as it did. But it soon became very popular. By December, the film was slashdotted
. Several hundred links from various forums and blogs followed in early 2005. In January 2005, they released an update to the original movie, EPIC 2015. The sequel follows the same general direction of the original, but also examines the roles of podcasting
, GPS and web map service
s such as Google Maps
.
Sloan himself does not believe the future portrayed in the film will actually come to pass, saying that he certainly doesn't believe that Google and Amazon would ever actually merge. He also believes that the New York Times would actually be the last media organization to fold, citing, "some incredibly good and smart things that they do in their online publishing." But he points out that the purpose of the film is not to paint an accurate picture of the future, but rather, to
illustrate the fact that the various monopolies
of the large media organizations are currently being threatened by many of the new online services. He states that, "It's very possible that there will be some crazy integrated suite of Google services that will rule the world, but it won't be such a big deal. I do hope that there will be an integrated and easy way to navigate the network of citizen reports."
Poynter Institute
The Poynter Institute is a non-profit school for journalism located in St. Petersburg, Florida. The school's mission statement says that "The Poynter Institute is a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders. It promotes excellence and integrity in the practice of...
in the spring of that year. The movie is 8 minutes long and is licensed under a Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
non-commercial license.
The movie is presented from the viewpoint of a fictional "Museum of Media History" in the year 2014. It explores the effects that the convergence of popular News aggregators, such as Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
, with other Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
technologies like blogging, social networking and user participation may have on journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
and society at large in a hypothesized future. The film popularized the term Googlezon and touches on major privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
and copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
issues raised in this scenario.
Plot
The plot consists of a series of real life events from 1989 to 2004, and going through a series of hypothetical events through 2014. The first sentence of the running commentary echoes the opening words of Charles DickensCharles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
' A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature....
, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
invents the World Wide Web.
In 1994, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
is launched. It is a store that sells everything, personalized for its users, that can even offer suggestions.
In 1998, Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
is unleashed by two Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
students, promising a faster, more effective way to search.
In 1999, Blogger is founded. Google comes out with Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
, a service unique in that it requires no human intervention.
In 2002, Friendster
Friendster
Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Malaysia, KL. The company now operates mainly from the three Asian countries namely in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore....
is released.
In 2003, Google buys Blogger.
In 2004, the rise of Gmail
Gmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
gives competition to Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Hotmail
Hotmail
Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and launched in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL". It was one of the first...
. Microsoft's Newsbot comes as a response to Google News. Picasa
Picasa
Picasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...
and A9
A9.com
A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search engine technology. A9 currently has over 100 employees in its Palo Alto, Bangalore, and Dublin offices.A9 has worked in 3 areas over the years....
are also released this year. In August, Google goes public, acquires Keyhole (now Google Earth)
Google Earth
Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographical information program that was originally called EarthViewer 3D, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency funded company acquired by Google in 2004 . It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite...
, a company that maps the world, and begins digitizing and indexing world libraries. Reason Magazine sends its subscribers satellite photos of their homes, with information tailored to them inside.
From this point EPIC passes into the realm of fiction.
In 2005, Microsoft buys Friendster in response to Google's action. Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
comes out with WifiPod, which allows users to "send and receive messages on the go". Then, Google unveils the Google Grid, a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.
In 2007, Microsoft Newsbotster, a social news network, ranks and sorts news. It allows everyone to comment on what they see.
In 2008, Google and Amazon merge to form Googlezon. Google supplies Google Grid, Amazon supplies their personalized recommendations. Googlezon is a system that automatically searches all content sources and splices together stories to cater to the interests of each individual user.
When explaining how Googlezon profiles its users, the identification card of a man named Winston Smith
Winston Smith
Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The character was employed by Orwell as an everyman in the setting of the novel, a "central eye ... [the reader] can readily identify with"...
appears on screen. Smith is the main character in George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
, in which a dystopian society
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
is ruled by a media-distorting government. The photograph on the identification card depicts Robin Sloan.
In 2010, the news wars rage between Microsoft and Googlezon. These "News Wars of 2010" are notable in that they involve no actual news organizations.
In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate
Fourth Estate
The concept of the Fourth Estate is a societal or political force or institution whose influence is not consistently or officially recognized. The Fourth Estate now most commonly refers to the news media; especially print journalism, referred to hereon as "The Press"...
awakens to make its first and final stand. The New York Times sues Googlezon, "claiming the fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law", but the Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
rules in favor of Googlezon.
In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. The word "EPIC" is an amalgam of three fundamental physical and mathematical constants; e
E (mathematical constant)
The mathematical constant ' is the unique real number such that the value of the derivative of the function at the point is equal to 1. The function so defined is called the exponential function, and its inverse is the natural logarithm, or logarithm to base...
(Euler's number), pi
Pi
' is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. is approximately equal to 3.14. Many formulae in mathematics, science, and engineering involve , which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants...
(π) and c
Speed of light
The speed of light in vacuum, usually denoted by c, is a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second, a figure that is exact since the length of the metre is defined from this constant and the international standard for time...
(the speed of light in a vacuum). These are depicted in the shadow of the EPIC logo.
EPIC stores and categorizes not only news, but the demographics, political beliefs, and consumption habits of every user. At its best, EPIC is "a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before ... but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue." EPIC is so popular that it triggers the downfall of the New York Times, which goes offline and becomes "a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly."
It must also be noted that the narrative follows the epic format, with the clashing of antagonistic entities, conquests and retreats, a concern for genealogy, and the central moral question, often rough and binary but also thrilling, of good vs. evil.
The narration ends with the statement: "Perhaps there was another way."
History
The inspiration for the movie came from a speech about the future of the news given in 2003 by Martin A. Nisenholtz, CEO of the New York Times Digital, given to the Software and Information Industry AssociationSoftware and Information Industry Association
The Software & Information Industry Association is a United States based software trade association. The organization lobbies United States policy makers as well as conducting surveys and research and many conferences and webcasts....
. Sloan showed the transcript to Thompson, which, after much discussion and brainstorming, led to, "a very different interpretation of what Nisenholtz was talking about." After some back and forth discussion while on a trip to Miami, Florida
Miami, Florida
Miami is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States with a population of 2,500,625...
, Sloan and Thompson pondered Nisenholtz's original point when he mentioned the game Ultima Online
Ultima Online
Ultima Online is a graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game , released on September 24, 1997, by Origin Systems. It was instrumental to the development of the genre, and is still running today...
and put it into the context of journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
. They soon agreed that it is the most advanced example of a medium people create by merely participating in it. The game, Ultima Online, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
. As people play, they add to all the other players' experiences of the game, altering the whole fabric of the medium through their interactions with it. They wondered, "what if you could apply that model to journalism?" What if individuals could create and affect news stories simply by reading, viewing, and/or listening to them?
After their trip to Miami, Sloan and Thompson began assembling their ideas. They organized a powerpoint project, titled, The Miami Project, and began a series of presentations in their local offices at the Poynter Institute. Their colleagues were interested yet unenthusiastic about the project. In the spring of 2004, while preparing for an annual Online Leaders seminar at the Institute, they were asked to present it again. This time, they decided to present the story from the perspective of the future, as if it had already happened. They assembled the first version of the film late one night in Poynter's visual journalism lab, on a iMac G4
IMac G4
The iMac G4 was a computer that was produced by Apple from the beginning of 2002 to mid 2004. It replaced the aging iMac G3. The computer had a new design compared to older Macs. It had a 15-inch LCD which was mounted on an adjustable arm above a hemisphere containing a full-size, tray-loading...
running Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is a non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc. and then Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro X, runs on Mac personal computers powered by Mac OS X version 10.6.7 or later and using Intel processors...
. The narrative was met with enthusiasm by the conference participants, and they soon began revising and polishing their presentation, this time using Macromedia Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
. They kept presenting it, introducing the film dramatically – gliding into rooms wearing tin foil hats. They always followed the movie with the question: "If this is what the year 2014 looks like, what are you going to do today to make sure your news organization doesn't get sidelined? How do you make sure you can play in this environment?"
As the summer passed on, they thought of future plans for EPIC 2014, including a possible website with an interactive timeline and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
. Though these never materialized, and Sloan and Thompson eventually moved on to new positions, Thompson at the Fresno Bee
The Fresno Bee
The Fresno Bee is the daily newspaper serving Fresno, California and surrounding counties in that U.S. state's San Joaquin Valley. It is owned by The McClatchy Company and ranks fourth in circulation among the company's newspapers....
, and Sloan at the Current
Current (newspaper)
Current is an American trade journal that covers public broadcasting in the United States. It is described by the Public Broadcasting Service as "The most widely read periodical in the field"...
.
Finally, by the third week of November, 2004, they decided to just post the film. They posted it to three blogs: Convergence Chaser, Snarkmarket, and Jason Kottke's popular blog. They never intended it to become as widespread as it did. But it soon became very popular. By December, the film was slashdotted
Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily close. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from...
. Several hundred links from various forums and blogs followed in early 2005. In January 2005, they released an update to the original movie, EPIC 2015. The sequel follows the same general direction of the original, but also examines the roles of podcasting
Podcasting
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
, GPS and web map service
Web Map Service
A Web Map Service is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS database...
s such as Google Maps
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...
.
Sloan himself does not believe the future portrayed in the film will actually come to pass, saying that he certainly doesn't believe that Google and Amazon would ever actually merge. He also believes that the New York Times would actually be the last media organization to fold, citing, "some incredibly good and smart things that they do in their online publishing." But he points out that the purpose of the film is not to paint an accurate picture of the future, but rather, to
illustrate the fact that the various monopolies
Monopoly
A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...
of the large media organizations are currently being threatened by many of the new online services. He states that, "It's very possible that there will be some crazy integrated suite of Google services that will rule the world, but it won't be such a big deal. I do hope that there will be an integrated and easy way to navigate the network of citizen reports."
Cultural impact
The term Googlezon has gained a life of its own, sometimes being used to generally refer to real or hypothetical convergences of Google-like and Amazon-like technology. The term Amazoogle is sometimes used to describe the same effect.See also
- Consumer privacyConsumer privacyConsumer privacy laws and regulations seek to protect any individual from loss of privacy due to failures or limitations of corporate customer privacy measures...
- Google and privacy issues
- History of Google: Criticism and controversy