Baldur reflects on his family’s history in radio broadcasting, his path to interactive media and writing books and how he moved away from listening to tech podcasts.

Content warning: some coarse language

Podcast case study: Accidental Tech Podcast (listener)

Find Baldur at baldurbjarnason.com.

Read a transcript of the episode as a styled PDF or in plain text.

Links and Show Notes

Fourth Generation 00:00:00

• RSS


• Perl


• Interactive media


• RÚV is the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.


• World War II


• British invasion of Iceland


• Allied occupation of Iceland


• Attack of Pearl Harbor


• Telegraphy


• Axis powers


• Hotel Borg


• Vox populi (or vox pop)


• Web development

Interactive Media Environments 00:08:13

• Software widget


• Graphical widget


• COVID-19 pandemic


• HyperCard


• Macintosh SE


• Solitaire


• Tetris


• What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)


• Comparative literature


• Computer science (or ‘comp sci’)


• University of the West of England (UWE)
  
  
  
  
  • Bower Ashton campus map
  
  


• BBC Radio


• Dot-com bubble (including reference to the dot-com crash)


• Adobe Flash


• Sandbox (software development)


• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)


• ebook


• Amazon Kindle


• iPhone


• iPad

Defamiliarisation 00:15:43

• Artificial intelligence (AI)


• Cryptocurrency (or ‘crypto’)


• Popular culture (or ‘pop culture’)


• The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin
  
  
  
  
  • Recordings of public lectures in the Internet Archive
  
  


• Processor (computing)


• Musical genre mash-up!
  
  
  
  
  • Pop-punk
  
  
  • Post-punk
  
  


• Neosurrealism


• Accidental Tech Podcast


• Jason Snell


• Defamiliarisation


• Viktor Shklovsky


• Bertolt Brecht


• YouTube


• Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs


• Defunctland
  
  
  
  
  • Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History
  
  


• App Store (iOS/iPadOS)


• Tom Abba


• *This is not the future of the book


• Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason


• Open source

Pick and Choose 00:31:03

• Round table


• Narrative journalism


• 20 Macs for 2020 was released in multiple formats:
  
  
  
  
  • a podcast on Relay FM;
  
  
  • a series of written blog posts at Six Colors; and
  
  
  • a YouTube playlist hosted at 512 Pixels
  
  


• Facebook


• Twitter (rebranding to X)


• Revenue sharing


• Threads (social network)


• Bluesky Social


• Mastodon (social network)


• Algorithm


• Patreon


• Whisper (software)


• Descript


• Substack


• Email list


• Apple Podcasts


• Spotify


• du jour = ‘of the day’, e.g. ’soup *du jour’ = soup of the day

My Computer Identity 00:44:05

• Mac (computer)


• Macintosh Performa


• Microsoft Windows


• macOS (previously referred to as Mac OS X and OS X)


• Pro Tools


• <a href="https://developer.apple.com/d