A New Documentary Of The Internet (Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog Has Met The Internet and It Is Us

Alex Pasternack | August 22, 2016

[Blogger's note: Herzog is considered one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schröter, and Wim Wenders. Herzog's films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature.French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive." American film critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular." He was named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time magazine in 2009. - from Wikipedia.]
Look, the internet is so many things, everywhere and nowhere, necessary but often completely obscure to us. Talking or thinking about it is, like a sign-on screen, practically an invitation to get lost. The so-called "network of networks" now represents digital culture, new media, new war, the global commons, a digital Times Square, the world's economic engine, increasingly, everything. It is also arguably a kind of work of art—is it the greatest masterpiece of human civilization? It's what William Gibson imagined it would be, after wandering around Vancouver, listening to his new Walkman for the first time: "A consensual hallucination," he wrote in Neuromancer about cyberspace,
experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... [William Gibson in Cyberspace]

[Click on link for video.] Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/herzog-lo-and-behold-internet-dreams

[Click on link for video.] "In his newest film, Werner Herzog is again asking existential questions -- this time, about the internet. In “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World,” released in theaters on Friday, Herzog analyzes this ever-expanding fortress of information, and how it promises possibilities of both progress and catastrophe." Source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/legendary-filmmaker-explores-internet-reflects-human-nature/

<more at http://motherboard.vice.com/read/herzog-lo-and-behold-internet-dreams; related articles and links: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/legendary-filmmaker-explores-internet-reflects-human-nature/ (Legendary filmmaker explores how the internet reflects human nature. August 19. 2016) and http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/movies/werner-herzog-lo-and-behold.html?_r=0 (Werner Herzog Says ‘The Internet Has Its Glorious Side’. August 18, 2016)>