In the spirit of cross-domain thinking, I am going to depart from the archives domain because I’d like to blog about the The Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture by Anthony Lilley, Chief Exec of Magic Lantern entitled The Me in Media which was on the TV last week. I just thought it was quite an interesting take on television and where communication and ‘conversation’ is going – very relevant to the world that us information professionals now inhabit.

Anthony Lilley talked about three main features of media: networks and interactivity, which are both changing radically, and also the power of narrative, which is eternal. I can’t say that I’ve got any great insights into how archivists fit into all of this but certainly our role is about communication and about preserving stories and narratives for the future.

A child of today will become the ‘still centre of their own web of media’, choosing what to create, when and where, and most of this will be interactive. We will all still be making sense of the world and constructing stories, but this will have a great deal less to do with the mass media and very little of what there is will be broadcast in the traditional sense.

In the future we may look back at the arrival of TV as an incremental change to broadcasting, whereas we are now at start of change in type, not in scale. Lilley suggested that TV has not got to grips with the magnitude of this change. It is vital that TV starts to engage more fully with the interactive world, going well beyond the