The Opinion Engine 2.0:7/31:3D - do we actually need it this time around? And is it ever, EVER a good idea to convert a film into it?

Question asked by @Discodave75.

Film Usually when I’m asked for my opinion on 3D, a question which seems to crop up with a regularity second only to something Doctor Who related, I’ll usually say that film companies are desperate to find something to bring audiences back to cinemas and have fallen on the return of 3D with the same glee as sound, colour and letterbox. But that it would remain a gimmick until films are made whose stories or at the very least characters and themes are less comprehensible in 2D, just as some colour films are diminished in black and white, letterboxing is spoiled by cropping or panning and scanning and actually take advantage of format in the same way as sound, especially surround sound.

The problem has always been however that really all I’ve been doing is parroting out the views of Kermode, Ebert, Bordwell and a legion of internet commenters all of whom are firmly against 3D, essentially having, as some correspondents on This American Life suggested a couple of years ago, someone else’s argument. 3D to me has been either the two colour process, the experimental format employed for Doctor Who’s Dimensions In Time which required the camera to keep moving or in the present format an old style IMAX demonstration film from ten years ago and this admittedly positive Odeon preview of some trailers to really go on. I needed to see it employed in a narrative format at some point.

Which has meant, for the purposes of answering this question, I took a rare trip to the cinema this afternoon, to FACT Liverpool, for the 3D presentation of Martin Scorcese’s new film, Hugo. This wasn’t approached without some nerves. Thanks to so many horrible experiences with audiences, poor projection and immense ticket prices, I’ve gotten out of the habit of even attending the cinema, preferring instead the large television and comfy seating of my home, with the added plus of the pause button now that I’ve developed the bladder constitution of a pensioner at the age of thirty-seven. I’m pleased to report that this was an attentive albeit small audience, the film was beautifully projected and although the ticket price was £9, it included some reusable glasses.

The film itself is wonderful, magical and everything the less sniffy, more positive reviewers have led us to believe. The fictionalised story of an orphan who discovers the history of cinema and in particular pioneering director Georges Méliès in his bitter, penniless dotage working as a toy salesman in Montparnasse Station, it captures the magic of those earlier times through recreations of his film studio and working methods, as well as the simple pleasures of their stories through romances and chases in the station itself. Life affirming is a phrase ruined because of kitsch over-deployment, but in Scorsese’s love letter to the medium in which he's made his career, we’re reminded of cinema’s capacity to heal the soul.

All of which said, I’m disappointed to say that I’m not sure that any of those things wouldn’t be as true if I’d seen it in 2D. Hugo was shot using 3D cameras, and the director himself has also said that he’s still getting used to the format, suggesting it’s still in its infancy and should be judged as such. Certainly there’s a certainly breathless excitement as the camera cranes and zooms in and out of Hugo’s world, past trains (in homage to the early Lumiere film) and into the clock tower were he lives and hides, weaving between the cogs and mainsprings. Scorsese and his regular cinematographer Robert Richardson make full use of these new tools to dimensionalise the painterly Paris pioneered by Marcel Carné and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

But to some extent, as I expected, in the quieter moments, when the film isn’t putting images just in front of our faces, when two people are chatting in a room, I did wonder if I was tolerating the 3D, enjoying the film in spite of the format rather than because of it. Some of the most exciting moments are when clips are shown of  old films including the famous pink-tinted aerial shot of Babylon from Griffith’s Intolerance, during which I took my glasses of in order to marvel at them with my own eyes, especially since it’s the first time I’ve seen them projected at the intended scale with such a clean print. It’s not until you can see every figure on that ambitious set that you can fully understand the grandeur of what Griffith was trying to accomplish.

I'd also agree with Kermode et al, that 3D gives the image an extra layer of unreality beyond the CGI and artifice already inherent in cinema, thanks to how objects sit on the dimensional frame.  Some critics are suggested the effect is similar to a Viewmaster, in which figures seem rather flat, like cardboard creations in a child's table top theatre but the effect is also akin to the landscape sprites in early home computer racing games, just about acceptable as a car or in this case camera swoops past them, but without distractingly undimensional when caught with the corner of the eye.  Scorsese is also still employing focus with a two dimensional sensibility which means that very often an object fuzzily lurches out towards us drawing our vision away from the most important element of the shot.  Following the rapidly updating geography of the 3D picture is hard work.

There are also practical concerns. The glasses are uncomfortable and I spent most of the film fidgeting with them as they slide up and down my nose and made the side of my ears itchy. Although Scorsese makes it work to the film’s period, the glasses do make the image dimmer and the lenses were also reflecting visual information from behind and beside me, such as the light on the emergency exits. When instructed to put them on before the trailers, I also noticed a number thirteen floating in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t in any of the adverts and I feared I’d spend the whole of the film with it until I realised that the seat number had been screwed to the back of FACT’s comfy new seats. It went as soon as I hung my scarf over it.

All of which sadly confirmed everything I’d been hearing about the experience of watching a 3D film.  I am willing to admit that some of this might have to do with fulfilling pre-existing prejudices. Except, I’m a fan of cinema and was genuinely excited to see my first whole film in the format but there were just too many moments when I wanted to take the glasses off and simply watch the film without them, especially when shots were lost in a mist of hazing when the two images which make up the picture didn’t quite match (especially true of during one particularly important scene at the end). Scorsese’s tried his best, but the 3D’s distracting, the glasses are distracting and I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to go through this again.

So I’m back to watching everything in 2D again for a while. But 3D has changed the way films are constructed. Even when films are filmed flatly, it’s often with an eye to retrofitting which means the shot selection and pace of the thing changes. To some extent it’s helped action sequences especially amongst sympathetic directors and editors who seem pleased to be able to shift backwards from the punishingly fast shot durations which populated the thriller genre in the late noughties. But for technical reasons its also seen a vast increase in the medium close-up (heads and shoulders) and I do wonder if its had a knock on effect on tension in some character-based scenes. Would the Joker's interrogation in The Dark Knight have been as intense if shot for 3D?

When these films are retro-fitted such choices find their purpose, except if Hugo presents what a great director working at the top of his game with cutting edge technology achieves, I really hate to think what some of these faux-D films must look like. Hugo also highlights how Méliès himself indulged in a primitive form of retrofitting, shooting Le Voyage dans la Lune in black and white before hand-painting each frame in colour as part of his post-production process. Is this any different? Perhaps it isn’t. But having seen plenty of 2D presentations of these films over the past twelve months I can’t think of one which would have been benefited by an extra dimension, or at least may have become more entertaining.

But Méliès thought that by adding colour to his films, however crudely, he would enhance the magic of them and that’s been Scorsese’s thought in producing Hugo with the latest technology. But each time one of his directorial ancestors films appeared all I could think was how the Frenchman was able to produce what were then and are still visionary works in two-dimensions and how, in the few moments when that work is also retro-fitted during this work, it detracts from his achievement. Ultimately, then, from my meagre experience, I don’t think we need this form of 3D right now. Which isn’t to say when the technology moves on and we can watch them without glasses as has been hinted, my opinion won’t change.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:6/31:We look forward to receiving your (Doctor Who) reviews.

Review copies sent by AudioGo.

Books Despite the casting notice on the inlay, neither the synopses or indeed the cover of this month’s Doctor Who Magazine are backwards in coming sideways on the casting coup at the heart of this final two part chunk of Doctor Who’s Serpent Crest, David Troughton putting in an appearance as Doctor 2 and lending his interpretation of his father’s performance previously heard in audio books. Sure enough, he’s uncanny, especially when articulating Second’s catchphrases, his "oh dears" or "giddy aunts" and for the most part entirely respectful to his father’s work and there are moments, especially with Mrs Wibbsey then Mike Yates narrating each episode, that we could be listening one of the missing episode releases (after Mark Ayres has pulled a few all nighters to remove the static and sound of someone having their dinner in the background).

But Tom Baker still stars as teeth and curls and this is the resolution of a five parter which bewilderingly had seemed like it was resolved after just three, with Alex returned to take up his princely place in the Robotov Empire and the Fourth Doctor heading back off into the time vortex. The Hexford Invasion picks up months later with Wibbs ensconced in village life, suspicious of the next door neighbour’s bee hives and nauseated by a novelist who’s moved into Hexford and become fast friends with everyone. This is Paul Magrys channelling Posy Simmons, employing Wibbs’s acerbic wit to comment on the boredom of life after the Doctor. But it’s not long before UNIT, led by a re-commissioned Mike and Doctor 2 roll into town, set up shop in Nest Cottage and the usual shenanigans ensue.

The Hexford Invasion then becomes a Pertweean village caper from the point of view of the citizens, their tranquil yet sinister life disrupted by these army men and their befuddled, hoboish friend. Wibbs doesn’t like or trust Doctor 2, he’s not her Doctor and seeing him through her eyes, neither do we. When Tom finally arrives, of course we look forward to how the two men connect (having missed each other in The Five Doctors) and sure enough there’s some magic, as the play becomes a kind of Time Lord Spy Vs. Spy, as they each attempt to discover the motives of the other, Fourth not remembering anything which is happening, no Time Crash informed bootstrap paradoxes here thanks to a veiled reference to Season 6b. I won’t spoil things, but it’s safe to say this isn’t a “you were my Doctor” weep fest.

It’s also barely a spoiler to say that the alien hoards massing above the village are the Skishtari seeking the egg which was buried at the close of Aladdin Night though to say much about their methodology would be, so I’d stop reading here if you don’t want to know the score.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:5/31:Do you agree with Tennyson, that "Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"?

 Guest answer by Alynn Gibson.

Life  My grandmother passed away in July after a long decline due to a dementia that robbed her of her physical vitality and her mental acuity. We had a difficult relationship, she and I, over the last six years of her life, years in which my parents and I worked to take care of her. She was difficult and emotionally distant when I was a child; in my adulthood, as she declined into dementia, she somehow became more difficult and more distant, but she also became increasingly detached from reality, which made her difficult to relate to. I had been expecting the end for six months, but when the end finally came I realized how wrong I had been the previous months in thinking the end was near; the final week of her life, her final decline, were noticeably different as her body and her mind shut down.

I thought, before she passed, that I wouldn't really mourn her -- in many ways, I'd been mourning her for years, because her dementia had turned her into someone that looked like my grandmother in body but didn't resemble her at all in mind; in other ways, I knew death would be a release for her -- but the truth is I was devastated. I sat on the stairs. I didn't just weep, I howled. My father asked me to call my siblings to let them know she was gone, and I couldn't make it through any of the conversations without breaking down. My mother asked me to say a few words at the memorial service, and despite thinking I would be fine, I had another meltdown at the podium. Despite living daily for six years with the knowledge of my grandmother's mortality, I hadn't emotionally processed it. I hadn't mourned her the way I told myself I had. As difficult as my relationship was with her, as distant as she so often was, I loved my grandmother and I was hurt that she was gone.

In my teenage years and in my twenties, my relationship with my grandparents was not close because, like a teenager, I didn't need them, I didn't relate to them, and they weren't interesting to me. When my grandfather passed away, the day Star Wars Episode I opened, I was hurt and I was sad, but it was a distant kind of hurt. In the subsequent decade, I grew up, and I grew into a person who would have appreciated his grandfather more. There are things I want to know from him today that I didn't want to know fifteen years ago. I want to know about his father Allyn, the name whose name I carry. I want to know what drew my grandfather to my grandmother when they met in the years before Pearl Harbor. I want to know what my grandfather's service in World War II, as part of the Navy's ballooning corps, was like. I want to know what my grandfather's hopes and dreams were, I want to know which dreams went unfulfilled, I want to know which dreams came true. My mother knows some of the answers, but she knows them as stories. My grandmother knew many of the answers, but her dementia robbed her of them. I knew my grandfather, I even loved him, but I knew and loved him as a kindly elderly man. Today, I wish I had known him as a person. Fifteen years ago, I was not the person who would have wanted to know these things, who would have wanted a deep and meaningful relationship with him. Today, even five years ago, I want to know all of these things -- and the sad truth is that I'll never have the answers.

One of the English language's great poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memorium, A.A.H.," wrestles with the same problems -- of death, of loss and regret, of mourning and coping. Its two most famous lines -- "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." -- are invariably quoted out of context today, given the gloss of romantic loss. Tennyson, however, meant the lines to be more universal; the poem as a whole was written over the span of nearly two decades as his reaction to and working through his grief for the sudden death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, and these two lines speak to Tennyson's belief that the grief one feels at the loss of a meaningful relationship, such as the one he had with Hallam, meant that one has lived and that one is still alive. Grief is a sign that we have had friends, that we have let others touch our lives, that we have touched the lives of others. Grief means that we feel, grief means that we have loved, and there is far more to love than the romantic. A life bereft of grief over its span is a life bereft of love.

I loved my grandmother. I knew her, she touched my life, however distant we may have been over the years, however frustrated I may have felt by her dementia. I wish at times I could have known her better. I wish often I could have known her husband better. I wish I hadn't pushed them away like a teenager. I wish I had worked harder to know them as people when it mattered. But I didn't, and even though I've grieved for them and mourned for them, I have regrets, and I will always have regrets. That's Tennyson's message in his oft-quoted couplet -- grief is always better than the regrets.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:4/31:What's your opinion of Zooey Deschanel?

Question asked by Annette of Annette's Notebook.

“One day, you’ll be cool.”

Film & Music  The first time I really noticed Zooey Deschanel, though in truth it felt like she'd noticed me, was near the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, in which she plays Anita, the rebellious big sister of William, Crowe’s avatar in this autobiographical piece.   She was leaving home to become an airline stewardess and before toddling off around the world she said goodbye to her little brother and as ever Crowe employed a point of view shot because he wanted us to see the world through William's innocent perception.

As she loomed over her brother, she looked directly at us and although the effect of this is lost even on the biggest television, in the cinema on a massive screen, we were collectively hypnotised by her saucer like blue eyes. I’ve never been cool, never will be cool, but when she said, “One day, you’ll be cool", a decade ago, I could well believe it and watching again for the purposes of taking the not quite convincing low angle shot reproduced above for illustrative purposes, I believed it again.

That single moment probably defines her entire career, the girl who makes you feel cool.  She does it again in the disappointing film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy which despite the best efforts of Stephen Fry as the book, is an abomination, but offers the best of the Trillians, which isn’t hard because (a) Douglas Adams himself had admitted that he always underwrote her in the early stories and (b) because Zooey steals every scene she's in, even when acting opposite a hypertensive Sam Rockwell as Zaphod.

She is understated. Human. Even more so than Martin Freeman whose main crime is not being Simon Jones, which is odd because Zooey is neither Susan Sheridan or Sandra Dickinson.  But unlike either of those her Trillian seems like someone you could meet at a party, fall for, but who'll ultimate leave with some other, spacey guy, unless she's in the mood to make you think better of yourself, work through your low-self esteem and, yes, one day make you cool. 

It took a few more years before someone neatly defined that special quality, the manic pixie dream girl. Since being coined by Nathan Rabin at The AV Club, it’s become the key discoursal phrase when describing the girl who saunters into a rather straight protagonist’s life and shakes it up, the kind of figure Arthur Dent epitomises even if the weird meta-narrative he's trapped in has other plans. Not every role. You could argue against Anita and certainly Alma in The Happening barely qualifies (a film which we’ll return to),

But in Elf, Yes Man and 500 Days of Summer and countless others, she’s the slightly quirky, bo-ho figure, usually with an ability to sing who causes some male to look again at their life and find it wanting. But unlike other MPDGs, the Kirsten Dunsts or Natalie Portmans who’re acting the role, and despite having not appeared in Rabin's original list, Zooey embodies it and when in the above examples she's not offering the smirk of giddy tolerance every five minutes, she's working against her natural tendencies.

From what I’ve seen of her television series New Girl (which is admittedly not much), it’s also a continuation of all that tone. You know what you’re going to get from a Zooey Deschanel performance which is really quite comforting. We expect musicians or directors to keep within their own style, with one or two exceptions, so why should we expect anything more or less from an actor? She’s the master of the precise thing she does and projects have probably suffered when she's trying other things.

All very old Hollywood and it continues into real life (or the version of real life that's filter through gossip blogs).  Recording the soundtrack album to Winnie the Pooh is a very MPDG thing to do, as is wearing vintage clothes, co-owning a lifestyle website called Hello Giggles and marrying the lead vocalist from a mid-level band like Death Cab for Cutie, presumably breaking the heart of some other bloke close to hand, before perhaps breaking his heart too.

Not that she’s the reason to watch every film. As with everyone else involved, The Happening almost ended her career, though I still argue that even if you disagree with intent, “Night” directed the actors to “do it that way” so they can’t really be held responsible (not that admittedly “following orders” isn’t a recipe for trouble).  Most recently she was wasted in Your Highness (incidentally with Portman), a film which only seems to work if you’re the breed of person who thinks Danny McBride is the comic genius he isn’t.

Zooey’s musical career has happily been more adorable. As one half of She & Him, M. Ward being the Him, she’s produced the musical equivalent of her fashions, recalling the vintage tones of the 40s and 50s but with a modern twist. The original material was summed up well by Pitchfork in an interview when they suggested “listening to your lyrics I sometimes feel like a big sister is giving me advice” (bringing us back to Almost Famous).

The cover versions are something else, amongst other things recapturing Gonna Get Along Without You Now from a myriad tonally incorrect disco versions though somehow also influenced by the rendition on Laverne and Shirley Sing. Yes, that Laverne and Shirley.  Their new acoustic Christmas disc is right on form, with almost minimalist accompaniment to old faithfuls like Have Yourself a Merry Christmas, the art redolent of dime store LPs from the 1950s.

In other words, my opinion of Zooey Deschanel is that she’s adorable and just the big sister I would have wanted growing up if I hadn’t been an only child and far younger than I am now. I appreciate she’s not to everyone’s taste, the reaction to her singing of the US national anthem proved that, but I’m yet to particularly find a flaw. Anyone who can be plagued by her similarity to some new singer who’s just turned up yet still agree to appear in a photograph with her has to be a bit funny and they’re the kinds of people I tend to like.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:3/31:Which writers are you most influenced by?

Question asked by Graham Kibble-White of TV Cream.

Life Is it possible to have a favourite writer who doesn't influence your own writing? Given how many authors have their own definitive style yet enjoy the work of others, sometimes in entirely different genres, then it must be. But perhaps, "influence" doesn't just mean in terms of style but on a more fundamental level, in relation to structure or world view. In attempting to list which writers have influenced me, I've come to the conclusion that the distinction isn't as clear, that I don't have a particularly distinctive style anyway.

Some of that has to do with never really receiving formal training, if such a thing exists. At school, GCSE English Language consisted of endless assignments, fiction, but sometimes essays, each of which would be returned with red pen comments like “this needs more work” or “your argument is unclear” but I was too busy thinking about teenage things to really ask the relevant teacher what that meant. Then there wasn't an option for that subject in A-Level, just literature and after struggling through Beckett, Woolf and Chaucer for two years, I failed the course.

Which means that my ability to write, assuming I have an ability to write, has been entirely informal, that the people who've "influenced" me, have most likely taught me how to structure such things as paragraphs and sentences, but through the same process had led to the picking up of many bad habits, like sentences which seem to carry on endlessly, with comma, after comma, until they fill nearly the whole paragraph. But not to mention the seeming need to make those paragraphs have the same number of lines. That one's mine.

My primary source I’m unashamed to say is The Guardian and the writers thereof. I’ve been reading The Guardian since the mid-nineties and when I was scratching around attempting to work out how “proper” writing should sound and be, I decided The Guardian style was the thing to mimic even to the point of reading their style guide. That was certainly the case when I began writing this blog and probably still is even if my largely monosyllabic vocabulary isn’t always up to the task.

If you’re interested in specific writers on the paper, it’s who you might the expect, the Brookers, Hydes and Freemans even if I’m too embarrassed to be quite that acerbic. I was a big fan of Anna Pickard’s television writing back in the day, and Jon Ronson’s reportage has been instrumental in suggesting how to find the core of what’s happening whilst still illuminating through personal response. Elizabeth Day’s columns and interviews are also particularly fine.  Yes, if I've any ambition it's to have something professionally published in that paper.

Except I’m aware that my writing can be too discursive, too unruly for that and I think I can blame Douglas Adams for wanting to break off in the middle of one thing to talk about something else, deciding on what should be the right structure then ignoring it, finding myself in the middle of writing about one thing, when I should be typing away about something else, even ignoring what few rules I have cultivated. If not his actual writing, I certainly have his annoying writer’s block, though no one has yet had to lock me in a hotel room to finish anything because of a missed deadline. I’ve always hit my deadlines.  I think.

Elizabeth Wurtzel taught me how to be personal, or at least pointed me in that direction. Mark Kermode writes, but it’s listening to his Radio 5 show that I’ve seen the allure of being unafraid to forthright and dogmatic in my beliefs. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Roger Ebert show how it’s possible to be clever, accessible and yet also structural and I wish I had more of an ability for that. Numerous blogs. Perhaps since all of my writing is blogging right now, I’m mostly influenced by bloggers.

Then there’s Shakespeare. I appreciate it takes a certain particular hubris to specifically suggest Shakespeare as an influence, but if I’ve learnt anything from him, it’s that English isn't static. Grammar, spelling and punctuation should be malleable, manipulatable especially if using the wrong word in the right place has thematic resonance, helps an argument or is just funny. Many are the occasions when I’ve been pulled up on what looks like a grammatical error, a typo or poor spelling which I’ve done on purpose to make a point. Perhaps I’m just not very good at it. Perhaps that's why he's a genius and I'm not.

It would also be remiss of me not to mention (embarass) the person asking this question and some of the other people looking at this very blog post who contributed to the Off The Telly website, which demonstrated how it was possible to write knowledgably and thoughtfully about television and although I’ve said this before, it’s still true, that whole project, however rare I contributed myself, was instrumental in me returning to university for my MA Screen Studies, not least because my portfolio included one of the few pieces I did contribute.

But Graham continues to be an influence on my Doctor Who reviews, as does his colleague at Doctor Who Magazine Gary Gillatt, that being the first section I read each month, always feeling slightly let down when their by-line doesn’t occur. Also the old crowd from Behind The Sofa, Neil, John, Damon, Frank, Sean, Dave and everyone else, all the reasons I tried to get my review in first on a broadcast night because I knew they’d be on my tail with greater style and honesty in the hopes it’d look like they were copying me rather than the other way around.

This is the kind of piece which doesn’t really have an ending, so I’d be interested to know who you think my writing is influenced by, if I’m deluding myself with some of persons above (Shakespeare) and who you think I should be reading. Any influences become more or less apparent depending on the kinds of writing I’m attempting and no matter how much I try to make everything sound the same, there are still moments when I begin one type of writing in the wrong voice and everything goes catastrophically wrong. I wonder why?

The Opinion Engine 2.0:2/31:Your thoughts on where social media is heading (I keep asking you this).

Question asked by @kariebookish via Twitter.

Hello everyone. This Ignite talk is going to be about the future of social media.

Sorry, um, ah, I'll waiting for the first slide.

Right.

The short answer is, I don’t know.

Having been thinking around the subject for days, whole bit of speech which you’ll never hear, trying to develop a satisfactory answer, I’ve decided that I simply can’t.

The reasons are relatively simple.

For one thing, social media is one of those concepts or subjects which lacks a clear definition.

We clearly mean Twitter and Facebook and before that myspace, Bebo and Friends Reunited. But do we mean The Well bulletin boards in San Francisco during the 1980s? What about Empire Magazine’s comment sections in 1995 which was my first experience? What about Metafilter, or Yahoo! Groups, ICQ or Chatylist all of which I’ve used since?

Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet shows, social media began even earlier than that with the telegraph, with marriages even being conducted over morse code.

And what of smoke signals? Don’t they also count?

Of course they do. A glance at the Wikipedia, itself a form of social media, demonstrates that the definition is so loose as to include anything on-line that isn’t a static web page and even then arguably that’s a form of social media because it’s about communicating.

But also, unlike so many other things, it’s impossible to really forecast exactly what new bit of software or platform might develop to improve on what we have now just as when we all thought email was a panacea and little realised that however instantaneous that seemed there’d something even quicker.

Incidentally, um, next slide, email’s gone soon, I suspect. There are plenty of mailshots from companies, but usually that’s because those websites don’t have an RSS feed or their Facebook has a high noise ratio, posting the same topic six times a day.

In the future there will be new platforms, and social media applications will become even further integrated into software and hardware, but it genuinely feels as though we’ve reached a plateau in development terms, with Twitter and Facebook straddling simpler and more complex tastes.

Except it felt like that five years ago when blogging was everything.

In which case we have look at this question from an application perspective. How will we use social media in the future?

At 13:57 on the 1st December 2011, @thejimsmith tweeted: “Oh! People who think twitter is for conversation rather than screaming into the void. Bless.” Which is true.

Sometimes I’ll be tweeting for hours without a single reply hoping that whatever I’ve said is of such scintillating validity it requires no comment but knowing it’s simply that I’m creating just a lot of noise in someone’s follower list.

But the day before, I had a very long, useful conversation with @doublenagativeL about the Liverpool Biennial, one of hundreds across the years since I’ve been using Twitter, often with people who are near or total strangers.

The tone has been different every time, and there’s always the block button if I want to cut someone off.

There’ll be much more of both. Much more.

I’ve also stopped using the telephone socially too. Some recent chaos meant I had to have long conversations with friends and I was surprised at how difficult it was to anticipate when the next person was ready to speak, outside of the professional environment where I use the phone all of the time and the structures are more rigid.

Customer service is still in its infancy on social media but I could imagine it becoming more crucial. Increasingly, problems which I’ve not been able to resolve through normal channels have been easily dealt with through the Twitter account of the relevant company, M&S agreeing to send Mum a gift voucher because her Mother’s Day daffodils failed to open.

This will increasingly become the way companies interact with their costumers or as they’ll soon be called, users, and they’ll realise that the best feeds are those which sound as though they have passionate human being behind their corporate avatar rather than automatically simply linking to press releases.

Such things are expensive, but there’s a real benefit to having a dedicated Twitter user rather than someone who does social media on top of their other work, though it’s surprising how rarely such jobs are advertised. They’re usually still crouched in terms like “marketing” which they are but the skill set isn’t quite the same.

Search and other data applications will also become increasingly important. In Jan 2009, every search result on Google was advised as being harmful. My first thought was that it might be a virus. My second was to search Twitter and sure enough the entire planet was witnessing the same phenomena. The Googleplex was confused and Twitter also eventually let me know that the outrage had been resolved.

Oh I'm running out of time. Erm ...

Contexts will improve! Search for Liverpool on Twitter and the results are swamped with football related tweets. It’s possible to filter those out with carefully chosen terms but perhaps in the future you’ll be able to tell whatever that you don’t like football and it’ll do the job for you.

The data Twitter supplies is also being used by companies to test products, a massive, passive focus group able to provide instant reviews of anything from food to television programmes, something networks are discovering to their cost as they can watch the project they’ve nurtured over months being destroyed within a few minutes.

But similarly, this instant consensus allows us consumers base our choices somewhat on other people’s experiences. Not that we should become too carried away. We’ll still need experts. I think. I hope.

None of which wasn’t impossible before. It’s just that Twitter, Facebook and the rest make it much easier.

Like I said, there’ll be new platforms, new technologies.

Smart phones will become cheaper, data too, so within five or ten years or even sooner, everyone will have one, even me, with all the knock on social effects, positive and negative and it’ll be increasingly difficult not to be wired in making speculative fiction of the past look positively anachronistic.

None of which should at all be seen as me giving a definitive answer. Because I don’t have one. I simply don’t know.

But luckily I'm out of time. Thank you.

[Disclaimer: This is an imaginary talk in homage to the sterling work of those who were brave enough to speak at last night's Ignite 8 in Liverpool].

The Opinion Engine 2.0:1/31:The noble pasty or the ubiquitous pie. When should one choose one over the other and why?

Question asked by "Pastryman" from the comments section.

Food The first pasty I remember eating was a Sayers pasty. I grew up in Speke (Liverpool, L-2-4) and each trip to the parade of shops would include a visit to the Sayers. I now know this wasn’t the traditional Cornish style pasty which recently received the Protected Geographical Indication. It’s now what’s described as a slice, two flat pieces of pastry filled with some kind of meat, possibly beef, mashed potato and bits of carrot. Bought at the right time, just as it’s left the oven, it was just the thing to warm up my young body on a cold winter’s morning (assuming I didn’t burn my tongue) and I now know the perfect way for my cash strapped parents to make sure a cooked meal had passed my lips.

That’s (as is popularly known) why tin miners in the seventeenth and eighteenth century found them so useful, their capacity to contain a full meal, savoury one end, sweet the other, though when I saw that story on BBC’s Blue Peter I remember wondering how they’d know. When I did eat the more traditional shape, it was a treat, something special, something exotic even, with chewier meat and the crunchy plat across the top. Both are still available in Sayers, Greggs and everywhere else, but they seem smaller somehow, less special, presumably because there’s a lack of anticipation in something which is always available, always to hand. That’s true of most things when you grow. Apart from upstairs on the bus.

Only the larger variety, from The Pasty Shop, The West Cornwall Pasty Company and farmer’s market’s retain their mystique, a portable hot meal all in one place, less messy than a pizza, with less moving parts than a burger. I’ll sometimes buy one in Lime Street on my way home, for dinner, but in my heart of hearts its not the same from the plate, especially with the temptation to drown it in brown sauce or mayonnaise. But we humans are like that. We’ll design something which is perfect in and of itself then spoil it by add things it doesn’t need. I know I should simply eat it on the bus, but whenever I'm travelling home at dinner time, it's usually full and there's barely enough room to put my bag on my lap, let alone gulp down a a mix of pastry, cow and gravy.

Pies on the other hand love plates and there’s few more beautiful sights than the filling dribbling through the crack as you run you knife from the centre outwards as you prise opening the casing. That’s meat and gravy. But unlike pasties, pies are even more flexible, capable of containing a vast variety of fillings. All of the bakeries listed above have attempted to vary the pasty but not of them sit right, not chicken tikka, not baked beans and not even cheese and onion. But a pie could contain all of those and as well as a range of sweet options. It’s can also be shared. A pie for one might seem like a treat, but how much better for a family or some friends to be tucking in, and unlike a joint, without the potential to be disappointed by the cut of meat.

Pies are portable too, of course, but they can be unsatisfying alone, unaccompanied. The most memorable pie I ever ate, if not necessarily the tastiest, was accompanied. At the end of the last decade I was walking through Manchester city centre and because I happened to be wearing blue was offered a visit to Main Road to appear in the crowd scenes of the film There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble. It was October and it was cold. It was a long day too, despite the chance to meet the cast, Ray Winstone, Robert Carlisle and Gina McKee (who was very nice indeed). Plenty of people left, but at the end we were all given a meat pie, chips and gravy, which was warm, salty and filling and just the thing to tied me over for the long train ride home.

But the best pies, and if you’re really asking for my opinion, the pies I’ve most enjoyed are as deserts. Apple pies, cherry pies, summer fruits, pecan (though that’s more of a tart) covered in cream, custard or ice cream. Somehow, even restaurants with mediocre main courses are able to produce tasty sweet pies, because even soggy pastry is tasty pastry. That’s why the series Pushing Daisies and the film Waitress are so entertaining, not just the script but the visuals, pies which don’t seem to exist in the real world. Unless it’s just that I’m in the wrong part of the real world. Either way, in answer to question, pasties are best when portable, pies when they’re filled with fruit.