Late last year, in 2008, I was fi nishing work on another book called Electricity
for the Entertainment Electrician & Technician when Danielle Monroe, one of
the many wonderful people at Focal Press, sent me an email. Almost as an
afterthought—one of those oh-by-the-ways—she mentioned that we should
start work on revising Automated Lighting: The Art and Science of Moving
Light in the Theatre, Live Performance, Broadcast, and Entertainment . My initial
reaction was that I must be in some sort of a time warp because that book,
it seemed, had only recently been published. How much could possibly
have changed since September 2006?
There’s a viral video that has gotten millions of hits on YouTube called
“Did You Know?” by Karl Fisch. Fisch is the director of technology at
Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. One month before the
original edition of this book was published, he was asked by the principal
of the school to speak at the beginning of the year faculty meeting. Having
attended several of these meetings before, he felt that it might be a waste
of time to discuss “anything of substance” during the meeting. Instead, he
wanted to do something a little different. So he put together a thoughtprovoking
PowerPoint presentation about what it takes for a student to be
successful in the twenty-fi rst century. What he compiled turned out to be
pertinent not only to high school students but to anyone who works with
technology.
One of the most striking statements in the presentation—and there are
many of them—is the idea that we’re living in “exponential times,” meaning
that technology is accelerating exponentially. As of this writing, the amount
of new technological information is thought to be doubling approximately
every 72 hours, 3,000 new books are published daily, and there’s more
information in a week’s worth of New York Times than a person was likely
to come across in a lifetime in the eighteenth century.