By Erich Möchel
The author leaves, but the archives remain. In 23 years of reporting, a total of four archives were filled to the brim. From 2017 to 2022 alone, the 386 long articles with around three million characters, calculated in old print categories, were a multi-volume illustrated work.
This original standard for print magazines was developed and adapted into a computer format for the web together with the FM4 editorial team. The editors of the “Blue Page” have brought this unusual project with generous links to an unusual reach for news of this kind. The author leaves and already misses his colleagues.
ORF
The FM4 archive search opens via the magnifying glass in the header of each page, a simple keyword search is possible, but unfortunately Boolean does not work. On the plus side, the search option dates back to 2010 in both FM4 archives.
Die FM4-Archive im Scrollback
The entire report was aimed at people with a general education who are fundamentally interested in technology, but who have almost no technical skills, knowledge and basic interests, but rather completely different. Since these people naturally use more and more modern communication technologies, there should also be an interest in new technological developments and threats. This was the hypothesis. The initial skepticism in 2010 was whether and how these young people of FM4, more interested in music and culture, would be able to cope with the technological obsession with lyrics.
Three weeks after the end of the ORF future zone and the switch to FM4, there was no more doubt. The FM4 web team naturally adopted the layout, as if articles about eavesdropping interfaces in 5G networks, deep TLS transport encryption, or data mining have always been displayed with montages. The challenge for the author was to describe mostly not entirely uncomplex technologies with analogies and similarities, with downgradings and simplifications in such a way that interested editors of an indie pop radio can easily understand what can be achieved with this technology, why it works like this . It was always a relief when FM4s in service reported after editing: “Typos have been eliminated, everything is easy to understand.” And a triumph when it was also said: “An exciting story”.
ORF
The archive of the area of the future, hosted by the APA, is also searchable with simple keywords. Among the reports from 2010 to 2006 are 400 longer articles and analyzes by the author. Since 2006 FuZo has been managed by the excellent Dr. Günter Hack. In total, this archive includes more than 50,000 reports and articles dating back to 1999. Articles from 2006 to 1999 are not named, being the editor-in-chief author.
ORF Futurezone archives in scrollback
Another challenge was that all these chains of analogies and similarities in articles about the actual technical condition had to be approximately correct and not jarring. Technological circumstances should be represented in analogies and metaphors that are as clear as possible, so that an interested public can get an idea of how a new technology works or how a familiar technology is misused, without the IT community reading together making an increasingly anguished impression.
Deutsche Verlag
At the same time, the title and the first two paragraphs had to correspond to the restrained news flow of the Blue Page, because this was the only way to give articles that did not describe technical progress in the form of descriptions of new products such as smartphones or iPods the chance to achieve, because this progress also has a dark and highly dangerous side.
It was only thanks to the openness of ORF.at colleagues to this access to IT that it was possible to give cumbersome lead stories such as “Dispute over new surveillance interfaces for 5G” a scope that roughly corresponds to the explosiveness of their current technology – political content. And so saying goodbye to the colleges of ORF.at and FM4 is also the hardest part of this budget. The farewell from the upper echelons to the general management of the institute, where Internet news is currently regarded as a kind of “newspaper”, is a real soul fair with dancing synapses.
Epilogue
Such a surreal newspaper joke would not even have occurred to the then infamous surrealist duo Rubinowitz & Moechel in 1993. Kirch by the general management of the institute”.
