Edyth Starkie Rackham (1867-1941) Fairies Spider Web
World Wide Web Day
Mar 12
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
"I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
~ Robert Metcalfe, Infoworld, 1995
The terms "Dance and Technology" or "Dance Technology" refers to application of modern information technology in activities related to dance: in dance education, choreography, performance, and research. Besides information sharing there are even virtual dance environments and movement generated music. But before all that, do you remember connecting to the internet via modems and and the very slow baud rates? 300 bps, 1200 bps? Perhaps you still recall the distinctive connection tune played by the modems - named "Electric Sunrise Number 1" and composed by Shawn Rycroft in 1991, it effectively became the most played "song" of the decade!
The Dancer's Web
The World Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) centre in Geneva, Switzerland, as a way to communicate with co-workers via hyperlinks.
The web has become the main means of interaction, transaction and communication among humans, creating opportunities (and liabilities) for people in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.
The oldest known web page complete with hyperlinks, is online for historical browsing today. Click the original World Wide Web logo below, to browse back to the 1990s in time or go to:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
This reel, Dancer's Web, has been written to recognise the increasing role of the internet in the proliferation of Scottish Country Dancing.
For a useful set of resources and links for the Scottish Country Dancer, see our companion site:
or the corresponding facebook page.
And for one of the most useful resources on the web, The Scottish Country Dance Database, click the spider web!
And to see the dance, scroll below for a video produced by Iain Hale, 2009.
