The cult of celebrity is the black death de nos jours.



It's a plague that eats away at the soul of our culture: rewarding vapid mediocrity while distracting the mindless masses from the awful pointlessness of their lives.



Stuck in a dead-end job that robs you of your precious years? Hey look, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are getting married. Going to war over weapons of mass destruction that don't exist? Hey look, Britney Spears kissed Madonna. Is your dying planet ruled by soul-less corporations? Hey look, J-Lo and Ben Affleck aren't getting married.



It's summed up for me by the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger can be taken seriously as a politician purely on the basis that he's famous.



On the internet the same rules apply, there are over a million pages devoted to J "less talent than Miss Piggy's little finger" Lo, and hardly any of them correctly identify her film Gigli as a crime against humanity.



But a Google search only throws up about 20 pages devoted to AS Douglas.



Twenty pages!



Hmm, I was expecting that fact to provoke a bit more outrage at the extent to which this hero is unsung. I owe AS Douglas a personal debt of gratitude. His heirs made my tricky teenage years bearable. As well as getting me through some grim times, they made sure my formative years did not solely consist of pretending to read Kafka and Dostoevsky in public, angst-riddenly drinking miserable home brew and writing miserable bitter poems about the (legions of) girls who somehow managed to resist my angst-ridden, pretentious, miserable charms.



AS Douglas helped me get a job in journalism in a roundabout way, by giving me an extra skill that gave me a competitive edge. Incidentally he also fathered a multi-billion-dollar industry. The Cambridge student did all this in 1952, when he wrote his PhD thesis on human-computer interaction.



Still not impressed?



He illustrated his thesis by writing a program that allowed an operator to play noughts and crosses with a machine. In short, he invented the first computer game - more than 50 years ago.



Of course, the EDSAC system was slightly different from the PlayStation2 or the X-Box. It didn't support online play, 3D graphics, or indeed any games other than AS Douglasís Squares. Its display was a cathode ray tube and it took up a whole room. (Play Squares at http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/%7Eedsac/)



There's still very bitter disagreement over the title of "father of computer games". Ralph Baer, who, in 1967, created the first video game that could be played on a TV, had the idea in 1951. In 1958, a US academic, William A Higinbotham, rigged up an oscilloscope so that a dot could be bounced between two bars in a game called Tennis for Two.



Other technological pioneers fare better on the web, even if they don't get the fame they deserve in the offline world.



There are a couple of hundred thousand pages devoted to Tim Berners-Lee - and Ted Nelson has about 15,000. While they are respected in their fields, the average person in the street has no idea who these innovators are and neither do most internet users. Most will, however, know who J-Lo is.



Of course, being a discerning scotsman.com user, you know who Berners-Lee and Nelson are. I would never dream of insulting your intelligence by telling you that in 1990 the former invented the world wide web and the latter developed the concept of hypertext in the 1960s.



Without Nelson the internet would not exist. Without Berners-Lee only a few academics would use it. Without AS Douglas et al computers would not be as massively popular as they are.



Without Jennifer Lopez the world would never have had to endure Gigli.



Guess which one's a multi-millionaire.



No wonder there are so many online computer games that revolve around humiliating celebrities.



- Stewart Kirkpatrick is the editor of Scotsman.com

©2003 Scotsman.com

http://www.news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=1116182003