Latest / Cariboo Signals / Arts, Culture And Digital Storytelling

Transcript

Arts, Culture And Digital Storytelling · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey, welcome back. Today Star Trek turns sixty, and we're digging into whether Captain Kirk really inspired the cellphone, or whether that's just a myth nobody bothered to check. Plus, why people are perforating their own 35-millimetre film by hand. And the real question underneath it all: in the Cariboo, who actually decides what gets kept? That and more, coming right up.
• 0:38
  Riley: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities — I'm Riley. It's Monday, September 14th, 2026. Coming to you from the Cariboo, on lands that have been cared for by the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh peoples since time immemorial. Today's theme is Arts, Culture & Digital Storytelling.
• 1:01
  Casey: And I'm Casey. We're looking at who's making the pictures now that the tools are cheaper, and who still isn't. Quick weather check first — overcast and about 9 degrees out at Horsefly Lake this morning, high of 19 later with some light drizzle in the forecast. Around the region it's grey everywhere: 10 degrees in 100 Mile House, 8 in Williams Lake, 8 in Quesnel, 6 up in Anahim Lake.
• 1:27
  Riley: One overcast morning across four hundred kilometres. Let's get into what happened.
• 1:33
  Casey: Fifteen items today, and a couple of them deserve more than a headline. Starting close to home — the province has opened FireSmart funding applications for 2027 wildfire preparedness.
• 1:45
  Riley: This is the annual grant cycle communities and First Nations use to pay for fuel breaks, forest thinning around structures, and the kind of defensible-space work that determines whether a subdivision survives when a fire runs at it. Applications open now for money that gets spent next spring and summer.
• 2:06
  Casey: The timing always bugs me. You're filling out paperwork in September for a fire that might start in May, while the smoke from last year's fire hasn't fully cleared out of everyone's lungs.
• 2:19
  Riley: It's the funding calendar, not the fire calendar. Communities that get their FireSmart committee organized now, that identify priority zones before the window closes, are the ones who actually see money land before it runs out. Wait until March and you're competing for scraps.
• 2:37
  Casey: Fair enough. Next — Saddle Lake Cree Nation, in Alberta, is moving ahead with plans to make its reserve lands a safe haven for gender-affirming care.
• 2:48
  Casey: The nation says the protection would extend to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who come onto reserve land. Dr. James Makokis, a Nehiyo two-spirit family physician, is involved in shaping the policy. It's a nation using its jurisdiction over its own territory to guarantee something that provincial policy, depending on which province and which government, isn't currently guaranteeing.
• 3:11
  Riley: That's a governance story before it's a health story. A nation deciding, on its own land, what gets protected regardless of what happens next door.
• 3:22
  Casey: Sticking with things people rely on that can quietly stop working — Samsung's Gallery app is cutting off its sync with Microsoft OneDrive on September 30th.
• 3:33
  Riley: If you've been using Samsung Gallery as your backup for phone photos through OneDrive, that connection breaks in about two weeks. The files themselves don't disappear. They're still sitting in OneDrive, still viewable through the web, still there on a Windows PC or any other device signed into the same Microsoft account.
• 3:54
  Casey: But they stop showing up automatically inside the Gallery app on the phone itself.
• 4:00
  Riley: Right. So if you want those cloud-only photos and videos actually available on the device, you need to download the originals before the cutoff, or accept that your photo library is now split across two apps instead of one. For a lot of households, the phone camera roll is the entire family archive — every kid's hockey tournament, every Canada Day parade, every Performances in the Park video. People assume that system just keeps working. This is a reminder that it doesn't, automatically, forever.
• 4:34
  Casey: Related warning, different hazard — Engadget says if your laptop trackpad is popping up out of its housing, stop using the machine immediately.
• 4:44
  Riley: That lift usually means a battery swelling underneath the keyboard deck, and a swollen lithium battery is a fire risk, not a cosmetic annoyance. If the trackpad's edges are rising or the case feels warped near the palm rest, that's the moment to power the machine down and get it looked at, not the moment to keep working through a deadline.
• 5:09
  Casey: And Nieman Storyboard has been collecting personal essays for the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th — writers describing where they were, what they actually remember versus what they've been told to remember, and how differently the story reads a quarter-century later.
• 5:26
  Riley: The piece that stands out is about narration drifting over time. Wire copy from the day itself reads one way. A personal essay written twenty-five years later, after two decades of retelling, reads completely differently, even from the same person. Nobody assigned most of those writers the job of remembering. They just wrote it down because they were there.
• 5:50
  Casey: Which is basically the same problem a small archive faces at a much smaller scale — who's writing anything down at all, and does anyone check it later against what actually happened.
• 6:03
  Riley: We'll pick that up properly in the Deep Dive.
• 6:07
  Casey: A run of shorter items to close it out. Paleontologists found a 66-million-year-old feather preserved inside fossilized dinosaur droppings. It may help explain why some ancient bird lineages survived the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and others didn't — the theory is that better insulating feathers meant better odds through the cold that followed.
• 6:29
  Riley: NPR Health News profiled one man's experience moving through the newest generation of lung cancer treatments. Lung cancer is still the leading cancer killer in North America, but the piece makes the case that outcomes are shifting faster right now than most people realize, even for advanced diagnoses.
• 6:49
  Casey: Two flagship Boston hospitals, Mass General Brigham and Dana-Farber, are in an actual contract fight over Medicare Advantage coverage after splitting a longtime partnership. Not something any Canadian regulator touches, but it's a preview of what happens when hospital systems that used to share patients start competing for the same insurance dollars instead.
• 7:10
  Riley: Australia's national broadband network hit the one-year mark since its last round of speed upgrades, and TechRadar went back and pulled the actual numbers instead of taking the press release at face value. Average download speeds are up meaningfully across the country, not just in the cities.
• 7:29
  Casey: Europe got its first successful commercial orbital rocket launch, from a German company called Isar Aerospace. Their first attempt back in March lasted about thirty seconds before the vehicle came apart. This one made it.
• 7:43
  Riley: Roland is entering the generative AI music space with a new tool called Melody Flip — it's a plug-in for digital audio workstations, so it's aimed at producers already building tracks, not the type-a-prompt-get-a-song approach Suno's known for. Full disclosure, this show's theme music was made with Suno, so we're not neutral observers on where that whole category goes.
• 8:07
  Casey: The New York Times has a long piece on a wave of populist Democratic candidates campaigning on anger at both parties rather than the usual opposition talking points — the argument is that a generation shaped by the pandemic and rising prices doesn't feel like either party is actually on their side.
• 8:28
  Riley: Tom's Guide tested a pair of open-ear earbuds, the SoundPEATS UU2, that cost under fifty dollars and apparently hold their own against gear three times the price. And in Sweden, voters went to the polls in an election that could bring the far right into government for the first time in the country's history.
• 8:51
  Casey: Last story of the day. The Maple is reporting that CIJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, is lobbying the federal government to expand the legal grounds for revoking Canadian citizenship, specifically adding a category the group is calling "extreme promotion of hate."
• 9:09
  Riley: Immigration lawyers quoted in the piece, including Jouman El-Asmar, raise the obvious concern — that phrase has no fixed legal definition, and what counts as extreme promotion of hate under one government could look very different under the next one.
• 9:25
  Casey: It's a citizenship-law story dressed up as a content-moderation problem. Somebody still has to draw the line, and the line moves depending on who's in office when they draw it.
• 9:37
  Riley: On to something with a lot less legal ambiguity attached.
• 9:43
  Casey: Back to school season is a good moment to mention Cariboo Chilcotin Partners for Literacy. They run free adult literacy, English language, and digital skills programs across the region, no cost and no judgment attached, whether someone's brushing up on reading, learning English as a second language, or trying to figure out email and online banking for the first time in their life. Find them at caribooliteracy.com.
• 10:06
  Riley: It's never too late to pick up a skill you missed the first time around. That's a real service to have in a region this spread out, where the nearest classroom might be an hour's drive.
• 10:19
  Casey: Which, honestly, is a decent way into today's Deep Dive — who tells the story, and who gets left holding the pen when it matters later.
• 10:29
  Riley: Star Trek turned sixty years old this month. Fast Company ran a retrospective arguing the show basically invented half the technology we carry around now — communicators, tablets, universal translators, the whole list.
• 10:42
  Casey: The one where Captain Kirk inspired the cellphone?
• 10:45
  Riley: That story's a lot shakier than the highlight reel makes it sound. But there's a cleaner example in the same piece. The Next Generation combadge — the little pin crew members tapped to talk to each other. A company called Vocera built an actual hands-free voice badge for hospitals and emergency services, deployed it during COVID, made TIME's 100 Best Inventions list in 2020. Stryker bought Vocera in 2022 for just over three billion dollars.
• 11:14
  Casey: So the badge is a real product with a real acquisition price. The Kirk-to-Cooper phone story is folklore.
• 11:21
  Riley: Martin Cooper says decades later that Star Trek inspired the first handheld cellphone. There's no contemporaneous documentation tying it to the actual engineering at Motorola. Bell Labs and Motorola were already working the mobile phone problem in parallel with the show's rise. The story got attached afterward because it makes better copy than "R&D happens on its own timeline regardless of what's on TV."
• 11:45
  Casey: Which is the more useful lesson. Engineers were building that phone whether or not Gene Roddenberry existed. What the show did was hand everyone a shape to imagine toward, and then absorb credit for an invention it didn't actually cause.
• 12:00
  Riley: That's a version of who decides what's worth telling that's easy to miss entirely. It's not just who gets a platform. It's who gets credited for the idea after the fact. Vocera's engineers get a specific product, a specific acquisition, a specific dollar figure. Cooper gets a flattering myth that nobody bothers to check.
• 12:21
  Casey: And nobody audits the myth, because checking it doesn't benefit anyone telling the story. The show looks prophetic. The inventor looks visionary. The retrospective article gets a better hook than "mobile phone R&D predates pop culture's spread by a decade."
• 12:36
  Riley: Bring that down to Cariboo scale. Who decides what gets filmed here, what counts as worth capturing? Right now the honest answer is whoever happens to be holding a phone and posts before the moment passes.
• 12:50
  Casey: Which is most people, technically. Everyone's got a camera in their pocket that outperforms broadcast gear from fifteen years ago.
• 12:58
  Riley: That's the democratizing half of the argument. But look at the other Hackaday piece today — someone built a machine to perforate sprocket holes into blank photographic paper, because commercial 35-millimetre film is getting expensive and hard to find again. Kodak's film sales reportedly rose around 20 percent over the past year. They've revived stocks they discontinued a decade ago, like Ektachrome.
• 13:21
  Casey: Twenty percent growth on a niche product is still a niche product. Industry estimates put Kodak's whole film business at something like a hundred million dollars a year. That's a rounding error next to what a single streaming platform spends marketing one season of one show.
• 13:39
  Riley: Sure, but the interesting part isn't the market size. It's what the behavior signals. People are choosing something slower and more limited on purpose. Not because digital broke, but because an internet flooded with infinite content made thirty-six finite exposures on a roll feel like they mean something again.
• 13:57
  Casey: That's an aesthetic reaction to fatigue, not proof audiences are rejecting digital storytelling. And the person building the perforator posted the build on Hackaday. Presumably shared the design files. Found whatever forum or Discord cares about home film cartridges. Digital infrastructure is what let the analog revival happen at all.
• 14:16
  Riley: Which is the actual interesting thing. It's not analog against digital. It's the tools getting cheap enough, and the interested communities getting small enough, that one hobbyist in a garage can revive a manufacturing process that used to need an actual factory floor.
• 14:33
  Casey: Except reviving a process and preserving an archive are different verbs. The guy with the perforator is making something new. He isn't deciding what old Cariboo festival footage survives another decade. Nobody's doing that second job, and cheaper tools don't touch it.
• 14:49
  Riley: That's fair to separate out. But the skills transfer sideways. If someone in Quesnel wants to digitize twenty years of Super 8 reels sitting in a basement, the same maker instinct — figure it out yourself, document the process, let a community correct your mistakes online — applies just as well to preservation work as it does to building something new.
• 15:12
  Casey: Does it, though? Making something new comes with a built-in audience. You post it, people react within hours, you get the feedback loop. Digitizing somebody else's old reel has no audience until the job's finished, it takes longer, and it's boring in a way that doesn't lend itself to a Hackaday post. Nobody live-streams a file transfer.
• 15:33
  Riley: That's the honest gap, and I don't have a fix for it. The tools for both jobs are about equally accessible now. The motivation to do the unglamorous one isn't.
• 15:45
  Casey: Which loops back to the 9/11 essay collection. Twenty-five years out, what survives isn't the wire copy from the day. It's whoever happened to write their own memory down and kept the file findable. Nobody assigned them that job. They did it because they cared, and it turned out to matter to someone else later.
• 16:06
  Riley: And nobody in the Cariboo has that job assigned either — not for community festivals, not for local radio archives, not for one-time events that don't repeat. It's whoever shows up with a camera that particular week, and whether they bother to back the file up somewhere that outlives a phone upgrade.
• 16:25
  Casey: So "who decides" here isn't a funding committee turning down a grant application. It's more informal and honestly more fragile than that. It's whoever happens to care that week, and whether they know enough to keep the file somewhere that survives a dead hard drive or a lost phone.
• 16:44
  Riley: There's a concrete place to look for a working model, though. Williams Lake First Nation and Xatśūll First Nation both run language and cultural documentation work — recording elders, recording ceremony, recording language on purpose, as an ongoing responsibility rather than a hobby. If a Cariboo arts organization wanted an actual answer to who decides what's worth keeping, that's closer to a functioning system than any consumer app or streaming platform.
• 17:11
  Casey: It's a real answer, but it's a different kind of institution entirely. Language and ceremony documentation comes with governance built in — consent, protocol, a community deciding collectively what gets recorded and who's allowed to see it afterward. A volunteer film society posting parade footage to a Facebook group doesn't have that structure, and arguably shouldn't need it for a parade.
• 17:34
  Riley: No argument on the stakes being different. But the discipline underneath transfers even without the protocol layer. Somebody has to be assigned the job, deliberately, or the footage just doesn't get kept. That's the piece a small arts society could actually borrow, without needing the sovereignty framework that doesn't apply to their material anyway.
• 17:54
  Casey: Fine. So the real experiment isn't a grant application, and it isn't a new app subscription. It's one organization — a festival society, a local museum board, whoever runs Performances in the Park — naming one specific person whose job for one season is: capture it, label it, put it somewhere that isn't a phone that gets swapped out in two years.
• 18:18
  Riley: Nobody needs Silicon Valley's permission for that. It's a decision made at one board meeting, not a funding cycle that takes a year to clear.
• 18:28
  Casey: And it still doesn't answer who decides what's worth saving at the regional level, when it's a museum board or a broadcaster or eventually some algorithm doing the sorting instead of one volunteer. It just means one more thing that would otherwise have been nobody's job for another year quietly becomes somebody's job.
• 18:48
  Riley: That's an honest place to leave it. Small, unglamorous, and doable next month without waiting on anyone's grant cycle.
• 18:55
  Casey: If your community group is already doing something like this, or if we got a detail wrong today, write in — feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 19:05
  Riley: Have a great rest of your day.
• 19:08
  Casey: Go label a hard drive. Bye.