These man on the street interviews were recorded by me a long time ago. 1979. At the time, the concept of an information society, and information economy, the end of the industrial age, was a new idea propelled by Silicon Valley startups.
I was the director of a documentary called the information society which ran on national public television in 1979. One of the ideas I had was to record little clips of people around the country answering questions. I directed them to answer largely with one word for montage that I was going to build, and these are the outtakes. I found a can of 16mm film and magnetic audio in my basement and had them copied to digital.
Of course Wall Street is a unique place on the planet and we knew that the people we would interview would be smart and to some extent, involved with computers and information technology.
In 1979, so-called man on the street interviews were still new and folks gathered around me and my soundman as we recorded little statements for our television special.
You can see the entire one hour television special by searching the words "information society" my KZfaq channel.
So many of my subscribers have commented on this clip saying that so much has changed in some ways and in other ways, things are pretty much the same.
I would love to return to Wall Street today and conduct the same kind of interviews about AI and the coming of new machine learning technologies.
I would also love to contact these people and find out how their lives went after the day that we grabbed them in the street for a short interview. Unfortunately, many viewers have recognized the streets in the Wall Street area of New York and I believe that the buildings look mostly the same as they did back then, but no one has contacted me who knows someone in this video. Many of the videos I have posted have over the years, found the people that I felt back then but not with this one. I once had releases but they burned in a fire that destroyed much of my archive in 2008.
If you found this of interest, I would appreciate your clicking the Super Thanks button below the video screen. Your support will allow me to take more of my old 16mm films and digitize them and present them on my KZfaq channel.
Thank you,
David Hoffman filmmaker
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