How to Shop Online & Check Your E‑Mail on the Go: A 1980s British TV Show Demonstrates

“Links between com­put­ers and tele­vi­sion sets are, it is always threat­ened, about to her­ald in an age of unbe­liev­able con­ve­nience,” announces tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Tony Bastable in the 1984 clip above, “where all the socia­bil­i­ty of going down to your cor­ner shop to order the week’s gro­ceries will be replaced with an order over the air­waves.” Do tell. Live though we increas­ing­ly do with inter­net-con­nect­ed “smart TVs,” the only unfa­mil­iar-sound­ing part of that pre­dic­tion is its ref­er­ence to tele­vi­sion sets. But back then, most every home com­put­er used them as dis­plays, and when also plugged into the tele­phone line they grant­ed users the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able abil­i­ty to make instant finan­cial trans­ac­tions at any hour of the day or night, with­out leav­ing the house.

Mun­dane though it sounds now that many of us both do all our work and get all our enter­tain­ment online, pay­ing bills was a draw for ear­ly adopters, who could come from unlike­ly places: Not­ting­ham, for instance, the Not­ting­ham Build­ing Soci­ety being one of the first finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the world to offer online bank­ing to its mem­bers.

Clos­er to Thames Head­quar­ters, North Lon­don cou­ple Pat and Julian Green appear in the clip above to demon­strate how to use some­thing called “e‑mail.” But first they must hook up their modem and con­nect to Pres­tel (a nation­al online net­work that in the Unit­ed King­dom played some­thing like the role Mini­tel did in France), an “extreme­ly sim­ple” process that will look ago­niz­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed to any­one who grew up in the age of wi-fi.

I myself grew up using the TRS-80 Mod­el 100, an ear­ly lap­top inher­it­ed from my technophile grand­fa­ther. Bastable whips out the very same com­put­er in the seg­ment above, shot dur­ing Data­base’s trip to Japan. “The big advan­tage of a piece of equip­ment like this is to be able to cou­ple it up back to my home base over the tele­phone line using one of these,” he says from his seat on a train, hold­ing up the acoustic cou­pler designed to con­nect the Mod­el 100 direct­ly to a stan­dard hand­set, in this case the pay phone in the front of the car­riage. Alas, Bastable finds that “none of us have got enough change to make the call to Eng­land,” forc­ing him to check his mes­sages from his hotel room instead. Would that I could send him a vision of my effort­less expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing to wi-fi onboard a train cross­ing South Korea just yes­ter­day. The future, to coin a phrase, is now.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Rick Steves Tells the Story of Fascism’s Rise & Fall in Germany

“Healthy, vig­or­ous, respectable: every­one’s favorite uncle.” How many of us hear these words and think of that most beloved of all Amer­i­can trav­el-tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties, Rick Steves? Indeed, in the video above they’re spo­ken by Steves, though to describe a fig­ure very dif­fer­ent from him­self: Adolf Hitler, who con­vinced his peo­ple not to tour Europe but to invade it, spark­ing the dead­liest con­flict of all time. How and why this hap­pened has been a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion writ­ten about per­haps more volu­mi­nous­ly than any oth­er. But the Stevesian method of under­stand­ing demands first-hand expe­ri­ence of Ger­many, the land in which the Nazi par­ty came to pow­er.

Hence “Ger­many’s Fas­cist Sto­ry,” a 2020 episode of Rick Steves’ Europe whose itin­er­ary includes such des­ti­na­tions as Nurem­berg, site of the epony­mous Nazi ral­lies; Hitler’s moun­tain retreat in Bercht­es­gaden; the Gestapo and SS head­quar­ters in Berlin. We’re a long way indeed from Steves’ usu­al cir­cuit of cathe­drals, mar­kets, and bed-and-break­fasts.

Enriched with the his­tor­i­cal footage and the reflec­tions of Ger­man inter­vie­wees, this trav­el­ogue explains the rise in the 1930s and fall in the 1940s of a pow­er­ful Euro­pean strain of fas­cism. This man­i­fest­ed in pop­u­lar capit­u­la­tion to race-based, nation­al­is­tic, and ulti­mate­ly total­i­tar­i­an state pow­er, not just in Ger­many but oth­er coun­tries also once regard­ed as the cen­ter of Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion.

We all know how World War II end­ed, and the blue-jeaned Steves sums up the rel­e­vant chap­ter of the sto­ry while stand­ing atop the under­ground bunker in which Hitler killed him­self. But such a defeat can nev­er tru­ly be con­sid­ered final, an idea that under­lies the con­tin­u­ing encour­age­ment of tourism to places like Berlin’s Memo­r­i­al to the Mur­dered Jews of Europe and the con­cen­tra­tion camp of Auschwitz-Birke­nau, which fig­ures briefly into this episode despite being locat­ed in Poland. As any ded­i­cat­ed “Rick­nick” knows, the pur­suit of any giv­en cul­tur­al or his­tor­i­cal inter­est inevitably leads the trav­el­er through a vari­ety of lands. Hence a project like The Sto­ry of Fas­cism, Steves’ hour­long doc­u­men­tary on that ide­ol­o­gy’s traces as found all through­out his favorite con­ti­nent. As he him­self has put it, trav­el is a polit­i­cal act — and it’s one nec­es­sary to under­stand­ing both the pol­i­tics you like and the pol­i­tics you don’t.

For those inter­est­ed in how Steves built his trav­el empire, we’d rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to Guy Raz’s lengthy inter­view with Steves, one episode in his How I Built This pod­cast.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Electronic Music Pioneer Wendy Carlos Demonstrates the Moog Synthesizer on the BBC (1970)

We can break pop­u­lar music into two peri­ods: before the Moog and after the Moog. Upon its debut in 1964, that syn­the­siz­er made a big splash in the small but long-estab­lished elec­tron­ic-music world by, among oth­er inno­v­a­tive qual­i­ties, being small­er than an entire room. Over the next few years, inven­tor Bob Moog (whose pre­vi­ous line was in theremins) refined his epony­mous brain­child to the point that it became acces­si­ble to com­posers not already on the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy. But for Wendy Car­los, the cut­ting edge of music tech­nol­o­gy was where she’d spent most of her life; hence her abil­i­ty to cre­ate the first best­selling all-Moog album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach.

By the begin­ning of the 1970s, great pub­lic curios­i­ty had built up about these new music-mak­ing machines, thanks to Car­los’ work as well as that of com­posers like the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop’s Daphne Oram. It was the BBC that pro­duced the clip above, in which Car­los explains the fun­da­men­tals of not just the Moog but sound syn­the­sis itself.

She even plays a bit of the sec­ond move­ment of Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­to #4, Car­los’ ren­di­tion of which on Switch-On Bach’s fol­low-up The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er moved no less an author­i­ty than Glenn Gould to call it “the finest per­for­mance of any of the Bran­den­burgs — live, canned, or intu­it­ed — I’ve ever heard.”

In this footage, more than half a cen­tu­ry old as it is, only an evi­dent skill at oper­at­ing the Moog and under­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ples of syn­the­siz­ers sug­gest Car­los’ iden­ti­ty. At that time in her career she was still known as Wal­ter Car­los, and she has since spo­ken of hav­ing main­tained that image by apply­ing a pair of fake side­burns for pub­lic appear­ances. (She would return to the BBC to do anoth­er Moog demon­stra­tion as Wendy nine­teen years lat­er.) Today one dares say those mut­ton chops look a bit obvi­ous, but it isn’t as a mas­ter of dis­guise that Car­los has gone down in his­to­ry. Rather, her work has showed the way for gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians, well out­side of cam­pus lab­o­ra­to­ries, to make use of elec­tron­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed sounds in a man­ner that res­onates, as it were, with the wider lis­ten­ing pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Com­pos­er Wendy Car­los Demo an Orig­i­nal Moog Syn­the­siz­er (1989)

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, “the Record of the Decade” (1968)

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Bob Moog Demon­strates His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Moog Mod­el D Syn­the­siz­er

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Muhammad Ali Explains Why He Refused to Fight in Vietnam: “My Conscience Won’t Let Me Go Shoot My Brother… for Big Powerful America” (1970)

In April of 1967, Muham­mad Ali arrived at the U.S. Armed Forces Exam­in­ing and Entrance Sta­tion in Hous­ton, Texas. “Stand­ing beside twen­ty-five oth­er nerve-racked young men called to the draft,” writes David Rem­nick at The New York­er, Ali “refused to respond to the call of ‘Cas­sius Clay!’” Offered the choice of going to Viet­nam or to jail, he chose the lat­ter “and was sen­tenced to five years in prison and released on bail.” Ali lost his title, his box­ing license, his pass­port, and — as far as he knew at the time — his career. He was new­ly mar­ried with his first child on the way.

When Ali refused to go to Viet­nam, he was “already one of America’s great­est heavy­weights ever,” notes USA Today. “He’d won an Olympic gold medal for the Unit­ed States in Rome when he was just 18 and four years lat­er, against all odds, defeat­ed Son­ny Lis­ton to win his first title as world cham­pi­on.” Ali, it seemed, could do no wrong, as long as he agreed to play a role that made Amer­i­cans com­fort­able. He refused to do that too, becom­ing a Mus­lim in 1961, chang­ing his name in 1964, and speak­ing out in his inim­itable style against racism and Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism.

Ali stood on prin­ci­ple as a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor at a time when resist­ing the Viet­nam War made him extreme­ly unpop­u­lar. Sports Illus­trat­ed called him “anoth­er dem­a­gogue and an apol­o­gist for his so-called reli­gion” and pro­nounced that “his views of Viet­nam don’t deserve rebut­tal.” Tele­vi­sion host David Susskind called him “a dis­grace to his coun­try” and even Jack­ie Robin­son felt Ali was “hurt­ing… the morale of a lot of young Negro sol­diers over in Viet­nam.”

Robin­son gave voice to a sen­ti­ment one hears often from crit­ics of polit­i­cal­ly out­spo­ken ath­letes: “Cas­sius has made mil­lions of dol­lars off of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, and now he’s not will­ing to show his appre­ci­a­tion to a coun­try that’s giv­ing him, in my view, a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty.” But the coun­try also gave Ali the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take his case to the Supreme Court, as his lawyer told Howard Cosell in the ABC news seg­ment at the top. “Ali had no inten­tion of flee­ing to Cana­da,” DeNeen L. Brown writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “but he also had no inten­tion of serv­ing in the Army.”

Ali strung togeth­er a liv­ing giv­ing speak­ing engage­ments at anti-war events around the coun­try for the next few years as he fought the ver­dict. It was hard­ly the liv­ing he’d made as cham­pi­on. But “my con­science won’t let me go shoot my broth­er, or some dark­er peo­ple, or some poor hun­gry peo­ple in the mud for big pow­er­ful Amer­i­ca,” he said. “And shoot them for what? They nev­er called me [the N word], they nev­er lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nation­al­i­ty, rape and kill my moth­er and father…. Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor peo­ple? Just take me to jail.”

Ali remained promi­nent­ly in the pub­lic eye through­out his appeal. He had become a “fix­ture on the TV talk show cir­cuit in the pre­ca­ble days of the 1960s and ‘70s,” writes Stephen Battaglio in a LA Times review of the recent doc­u­men­tary Ali & Cavett. He remained so dur­ing his hia­tus from box­ing thanks in no small part to Dick Cavett, who had Ali on fre­quent­ly for every­thing from “seri­ous dis­cus­sions of race rela­tions in the U.S. to play­ful con­fronta­tions aimed at pro­mot­ing fights.” Cavett’s show “pro­vid­ed a com­fort zone for Ali, espe­cial­ly before he became a beloved fig­ure.” And it gave Ali a forum to counter pub­lic slan­der. In the clip above from 1970, he talks about how his sac­ri­fices made him a cred­i­ble role mod­el for trou­bled young peo­ple.

He seems at first to com­pare him­self to ear­ly Amer­i­can pio­neers, Japan­ese kamikaze pilots, and the first astro­nauts when Cavett asks him about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of going to jail, but his point is that he thinks he’s pay­ing a small price com­pared to what oth­ers have giv­en up for progress — “We’ve been in jail 400 years,” he says. “The sys­tem is built on war.” The fol­low­ing year, the Supreme Court would dis­miss the case against him, swayed by the argu­ment that Ali opposed all war, not just the war in Viet­nam. He saw Cavett as a wor­thy spar­ring part­ner, help­ing the late-night host earn a place on Nixon’s list of ene­mies. It would become a place of hon­or in the com­ing years as Ali won back his career, his rep­u­ta­tion, and his title in the “Rum­ble in the Jun­gle” four years lat­er, and the Viet­nam War became a cause for nation­al shame.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Muham­mad Ali Gives a Dra­mat­ic Read­ing of His Poem on the Atti­ca Prison Upris­ing

“Muham­mad Ali, This Is Your Life!”: Cel­e­brate Ali’s Life & Times with This Touch­ing 1978 TV Trib­ute

When Jack John­son, the First Black Heavy­weight Cham­pi­on, Defeat­ed Jim Jef­fries & the Footage Was Banned Around the World (1910)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Kermit the Frog Gives a TED Talk About Creativity & the Power of “Ridiculous Optimism”

In 2015, 3.8 bil­lion years after “cre­ativ­i­ty emerged” out of “sheer­est empti­ness,” Ker­mit the Frog was tapped to give a talk on cre­ativ­i­ty at TEDx­Jack­son.

How did a local, one-day event man­age to snag such a glob­al icon?

Roots.

The famed frog’s cre­ator, Jim Hen­son, spent his first decade in Mis­sis­sip­pi (though Ker­mit was born of a ping pong ball and Henson’s mother’s old coat after the fam­i­ly relo­cat­ed to Mary­land.)

The con­fer­ence took place 15 years after Henson’s untime­ly death, leav­ing Ker­mit to be ani­mat­ed by Steven Whit­mire, the first of two pup­peteers to tack­le a role wide­ly under­stood to be Henson’s alter ego.

The voice isn’t quite the same, but the man­ner­isms are, includ­ing the throat clear­ing and crum­pled facial expres­sions.

Also present are a num­ber of TED Talk tropes, the smart phone prompts, the dark stage, pro­jec­tions designed to empha­size pro­found points.

A num­ber of jokes fail to elic­it the expect­ed laughs … we’ll leave it up to you to deter­mine whether the fault lays with the live audi­ence or the mate­r­i­al. (It’s not easy being green and work­ing blue comes with chal­lenges, too.)

Were he to give his TED Talk now, in 2021, Ker­mit prob­a­bly wouldn’t describe the audience’s col­lec­tive deci­sion to “accept a premise, sus­pend our dis­be­lief and just enjoy the ride” as a “con­spir­a­cy of crazi­ness.”

He might bypass a bina­ry quote like “If neces­si­ty is the moth­er of inven­tion, then cre­ativ­i­ty is the father.”

He’d also be advised to steer clear of a pho­to of Miss Pig­gy dressed as a geisha, and secure her con­sent to share some of the raci­er anec­dotes… even though she is a known atten­tion hog.

He would “tran­scend and include” in the words of philoso­pher Ken Wilber, one of many inspi­ra­tions he cites over the course of his 23-minute con­sid­er­a­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty and its ori­gins, attempt­ing to answer the ques­tion, “Why are we here?”

Also ref­er­enced: Michelan­ge­lo, Albert Ein­stein, Sal­vador Dali, Charles Baude­laire, Zen mas­ter Shun­ryū Suzu­ki, math­e­mati­cian Alfred North White­head, author and edu­ca­tor, Sir Ken Robin­son (who appears, briefly) and of course, Hen­son, who applaud­ed the “ridicu­lous opti­mism” of fling­ing one­self into cre­ative explo­rations, unsure of what one might find.

He can’t wan­der freely about the stage, but he does share some stir­ring thoughts on col­lab­o­ra­tion, men­tors, and the impor­tance of main­tain­ing “beginner’s mind,” free of pre-con­cep­tions.

How to cul­ti­vate beginner’s mind?

Try fast for­ward­ing to the 11:11 mark. Watch for 20 sec­onds. It’s the purest invi­ta­tion to believe since Peter Pan begged us to clap Tin­ker Bell back to life.

Do you? Because Ker­mit believes in you.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wit­ness the Birth of Ker­mit the Frog in Jim Henson’s Live TV Show, Sam and Friends (1955)

Watch Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Per­form “Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” with Ker­mit the Frog on The Mup­pet Show (1981)

Jim Henson’s Com­mer­cials for Wilkins Cof­fee: 15 Twist­ed Min­utes of Mup­pet Cof­fee Ads (1957–1961)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Has TV Rotted Our Minds? On Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast/Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Crossover)

Mar­shall McLuhan famous­ly said “The medi­um is the mes­sage,” by which he meant that when we receive infor­ma­tion, its effect on us is deter­mined as much by the form of that infor­ma­tion as by the actu­al con­tent.

Neil Post­man, in his 1985 book Amus­ing Our­selves to Death: Pub­lic Dis­course in the Age of Show Busi­ness, ran with this idea, argu­ing that TV has con­di­tioned us to expect that every­thing must be enter­tain­ing, and that this has had a dis­as­trous effect on news, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion, and think­ing in gen­er­al.

In this dis­cus­sion, your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er and Bri­an Hirt join with the rest of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life crew: Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey and Wes Alwan.

The result is much more philo­soph­i­cal con­text than you’d get in a typ­i­cal Pret­ty Much Pop dis­cus­sion. Pla­to, for exam­ple, argued (through the char­ac­ter of Socrates) in the Phae­drus against writ­ing, which he said amounts to off-load­ing thought to this inert thing, when it should be live­ly in our minds and our direct con­ver­sa­tions. Post­man’s book describes the Age of Print as high­ly con­ge­nial toward lengthy, abstract rea­son­ing. High lit­er­a­cy rates, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Amer­i­ca, con­di­tioned peo­ple to expect that this is how infor­ma­tion is to be received, and as such they were, for instance, pre­pared to lis­ten rapt­ly to the Lin­coln-Dou­glas debates in which the speak­ers pro­vid­ed lawyer­ly speech­es that might span mul­ti­ple hours.

Post­man, an edu­ca­tion­al the­o­rist, described tele­vi­sion as not just pro­vid­ing a no-con­text expe­ri­ence whose high lev­el of visu­al and audi­to­ry stim­u­la­tion beats its spec­ta­tors into thought­less pas­siv­i­ty, but that its pop­u­lar­i­ty pos­i­tive­ly infects all the oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels avail­able. Of course there is still in-per­son teach­ing, but tele­vi­sion short­ens atten­tion spans such that teach­ers now feel the need to con­stant­ly enter­tain instead of forc­ing stu­dents to make the effort required to attend care­ful­ly to what they have to teach. Of course there are still books, but they are less read, and the com­pe­ti­tion of tele­vi­sion for our time has changed the pre­sen­ta­tion with­in books so that they must be as imme­di­ate­ly and con­sis­tent­ly appeal­ing as tele­vi­sion.

McLuhan described tele­vi­sion as a “hot” medi­um due to its high lev­el of stim­u­la­tion, where a “cool” one like a text­book requires more active par­tic­i­pa­tion of the recip­i­ent. We dis­cuss how Post­man’s cri­tique fares in the Age of the Inter­net, which inter­est­ing­ly mix­es things up, with more inter­ac­tiv­i­ty (in that sense cool­er) yet even more pos­si­bil­i­ty for sen­so­ry dis­trac­tion (in that per­haps more impor­tant sense hot­ter). To sup­ple­ment Post­man, we also con­sult­ed a wide­ly read arti­cle from The Atlantic writ­ten by Nicholas Carr in 2008 called “Is Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid.”

For more philo­soph­i­cal touch­points, see the post for this dis­cus­sion at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes an equal­ly long sec­ond part that you can access by sup­port­ing Pret­ty Much Pop at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by sup­port­ing The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. Lis­ten to a pre­view of part two.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Watch 400+ Documentaries from German Broadcaster Deutsche Welle: Art Forgery, Fashion Photography, the Mona Lisa, and More

You’re cer­tain­ly famil­iar with Nou­velle Vague, the “French new wave” that shook up world cin­e­ma in the mid-2oth cen­tu­ry. You’ve prob­a­bly also heard of Hal­lyu, the “Kore­an wave” of pop music and tele­vi­sion dra­mas (and, increas­ing­ly, films) now crash­ing across not just Asia but the West. As for Deutsche Welle, lit­er­al­ly the “Ger­man wave,” you may know the term bet­ter in its abbre­vi­at­ed form: DW, the brand of Ger­many’s pub­lic inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­er. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured DW’s series Bauhaus World, a cel­e­bra­tion of that influ­en­tial Ger­man school of art, archi­tec­ture, and design, but it’s just one of 415 doc­u­men­taries free to watch on the DW Doc­u­men­tary Youtube chan­nel.

DW’s doc­u­men­tar­i­ans have a thor­ough­ly inter­na­tion­al man­date, as evi­denced by their pop­u­lar exam­i­na­tions of the dic­ta­to­r­i­al regime of North Korea, Bul­gar­i­a’s Roma mar­riage mar­ket, extrav­a­gant wealth in cen­tral Africa, and dire pover­ty in the Unit­ed States. You can also browse the archive through themed playlists rang­ing from pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics to human nature and soci­ety to cul­ture and arts.

That last sec­tion, no doubt of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers, demon­strates DW’s advan­tage as a long-stand­ing broad­cast­er sit­u­at­ed in the heart of Europe. Where bet­ter to start learn­ing about Goth­ic and Romanesque cathe­drals, top elec­tron­ic dance music DJs, Mar­tin Luther and the Ref­or­ma­tion, or the truth behind the Last Sup­per and the Mona Lisa?

Even more inter­est lies in DW’s explo­rations of less­er-known top­ics like the trea­sures of Turk­menistan, fak­ery in the art world, and Berlin’s Lit­tle Hanoi. There are also pro­files of such Ger­man fig­ures as Peter Lind­bergh, the late fash­ion and adver­tis­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er count­ed as an inspi­ra­tion by the likes of Wim Wen­ders, and Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, out­go­ing pres­i­dent of the Goethe-Insti­tut, a nat­ur­al sub­ject for DW to cov­er. Found­ed with­in a cou­ple of years of one anoth­er, both DW and the Goethe-Insti­tut take the pro­mo­tion of Ger­man cul­ture abroad as a large part of their mis­sion — and both do so in the knowl­edge that, to get oth­er soci­eties inter­est­ed in your cul­ture, you’ve got to show gen­uine inter­est in all of theirs as well. Explore the com­plete list of DW doc­u­men­taries here. And find more doc­u­men­taries online in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Beat Club, the 1960s TV Show That Brought Rock Music to 70 Mil­lion Kids in Ger­many, Hun­gary, Thai­land, Tan­za­nia & Beyond

285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satirical Film About the Invention of the Audiophile (1959)

Some­time in the mid-1990s, my father gave me his hi-end, hi-fi stereo sys­tem from the mid-1970s: a vac­u­um tube-pow­ered ampli­fi­er, pair of stereo speak­ers in wal­nut cab­i­nets, and a turntable. Heavy, bulky, and built with hard­ly an ounce of plas­tic between them, these com­po­nents lacked all of the func­tion­al­i­ty we look for in con­sumer audio today: no 4K HDMI, no Blue­tooth, no sur­round sound of any kind. As such fea­tures became de rigeur, my stereo migrat­ed to the clos­et, piece by piece, then out the door, to make room for new, shiny black plas­tic box­es.

Now, a search for that same equip­ment turns up auc­tions for hun­dreds more than its worth ten, twen­ty, fifty years ago. Why does obso­lete audio tech­nol­o­gy fetch such high prices, when there are appli­ance grave­yards filled with CRT TVs and oth­er relics of the ana­logue past? Blame the audio­phile, a very spe­cif­ic kind of nerd who spends their days obsess­ing over fre­quen­cy response curves, speak­er place­ment, and the opti­mal track­ing force of a sty­lus, immersed in mag­a­zine arti­cles, online forums, and prod­uct reviews.

While the rest of the world con­tents itself with stream­ing MP3s and tin­ny com­put­er speak­ers, audio­philes buy and restore old ana­logue stereo equip­ment, pair it with the lat­est in high-tech engi­neer­ing, wire it togeth­er with con­nec­tors that cost more than your TV, and build spe­cial­ized lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ments more like bou­tique show­rooms than any run-of-the-mill man- or woman-cave. In short, they tend to ori­ent their lives, as much pos­si­ble, around the pur­suit of per­fect sound repro­duc­tion.

Audio­phil­ia has trick­led down, some­what, in the renewed con­sumer love for vinyl records, but to com­pare the big box-store sys­tems on which most peo­ple lis­ten to LPs to the gear of the well-heeled cognoscen­ti is to spit upon the very name of Audio. The snob­bery and end­less dis­sat­is­fac­tion of the audio­phile are noth­ing new, as the 1959 BBC short film above shows, address­ing the ques­tion asked of audio­philes every­where, at all times: “Do they like music? Or are they in love with equip­ment?”

The charm­ing, satir­i­cal BBC por­trait brings this char­ac­ter to life for non-audio­philes, who tend to find the audiophile’s obses­sions unbear­ably tedious. But if appre­ci­a­tion for such things makes audio­philes just slight­ly bet­ter than ordi­nary lis­ten­ers, so be it. What­ev­er the dis­agree­ments, and they are numer­ous, among them, all audio­philes “agree on the fun­da­men­tal facts in life,” writes Lucio Caded­du in a “Survivor’s Guide on Audio­phile Behav­ior.”

Enjoy­ment of rhyth­mic, orga­nized sound may be uni­ver­sal­ly human, but for the audio­phile, that pedes­tri­an plea­sure is sec­ondary to “hav­ing a wide fre­quen­cy response and get­ting a real­is­tic vir­tu­al image, what­ev­er that means.” Audio­phil­ia, for all its priv­i­leged invest­ment in equip­ment the aver­age per­son can’t afford, can be seen as no more than an advanced form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Or it can be seen as a life “devot­ed,” Caded­du writes, “to for­mal per­fec­tion.”

via Ted Gioia 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An 82-Year-Old Japan­ese Audio­phile Search­es for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Elec­tric Util­i­ty Pole in His Yard

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

How Old School Records Were Made, From Start to Fin­ish: A 1937 Video Fea­tur­ing Duke Elling­ton

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.