User:StuHarris/biocode

Stuart Harris is an English author, television documentary producer and pioneer in the social uses of the internet. He was born in Petts Wood, a commuter dormitory to the south of London. Since 1980 he has lived and worked in San Diego, California.

Education and early work
Harris was educated at Tonbridge School and Queen Mary College of London University. He graduated with a B.Sc. (II-2 hons) in electrical engineering and physics. He had a short career as a stage actor, appearing most notably in Tony Richardson's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Royal Court Theatre in London. However, he failed to make enough of a name for himself to succeed in the highly competitive world of London theatre.

BBC Television
From 1965-1980 he produced and directed television documentary content for BBC Television's Science & Features Dept., working first for the weekly magazine show Tomorrow's World and subsequently for BBC-2's prestigious strand Horizon. He produced and directed ten science documentary films for Horizon, some of which were also adapted by WGBH-TV for the PBS Network series Nova.

In the late 60s and 70s he became an acknowledged expert on spaceflight, and was one of the producers of the BBC's television coverage of the Apollo program missions 13-17 and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. He served as field producer for the BBC-TV coverage of STS-1, the first Space Shuttle mission, in April 1981.

Work as an independent
After emigrating to California, Harris continued to produce and direct television documentaries as an independent, working from Beach Media Inc. of San Diego. His documentary The Neuron Suite won a blue ribbon at the Educational Film Library Association's American Film Festival 1983.

He also contributed to the literature of personal computing (see Published Works section,) and developed a computer application to assist production tasks in city magazines.

Social uses of the Internet
Harris was intrigued by the explosive growth of the internet, spurred largely by the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, in 1993. He was quick to see the social and artistic possibilities of an instantaneous medium connecting people all over the world.

He became expert in the use of Internet Relay Chat, wrote the first book about it, and developed IRC into a theatrical medium. He formed the cyberspace equivalent of an international repertory company, which he called The Hamnet Players. From 1993-95 this group staged two performances each of three "cyber-plays"&mdash;Hamnet, PCBeth (on the premise that if Shakespeare knew there was a choice he'd never have used a Mac), and An IRC channel named #Desire.

These tentative steps into a new culture attracted attention. Hamnet was reviewed by the San Diego Union and the Los Angeles Times Calendar section as though it was real theatre. The Hamnet Players became the subject of journal articles and graduate theses. In her book Cyberpl@y, psychology professor Brenda Danet wrote "Hamnet activities are of theoretical importance because this group was one of the first to challenge the conventional dichotomy between the "live" and the "mediated." She also wrote "Participants felt that something important was happening. A strong "sense of occasion" or of "collaborative expectancy" permeated the event. People made many comments revealing their excitement. One person declared, "We are making cyber-history" " In her graduate thesis, Mary Anglin wrote "the Hamnet Players are the acknowledged thespians of the IRC universe" . The search string "hamnet players" scores 14,100 hits on Google in 2012.

On 9 June 1996 Harris staged a world-wide social event, connected by IRC, which he called a synchro-meal. Families in USA, Scotland, Holland, Canada, Israel, Austria and Norway prepared exactly the same meal at the same time and socialised on an IRC channel. The event was professionally videotaped and became a major component of an edition of the PBS series Life on the Internet . The narration described the event as "an historic occasion. The world's first IRC dinner party." In the same program, MIT professor of social studies Sherry Turkle said "The internet is growing up to be cultures and sub-cultures, and villages, and different kinds of bars and bistros and coffee-shops..." Among those physically present at Harris's party were the well-known computer book authors Andy Rathbone and Tina Rathbone.

Stuart Harris was the star guest for the 7 June 2000 production Lifegame, staged at the La Jolla Playhouse by the Improbable theatre Company. Parts of his life story were sardonically acted out in improv by members of the company.

Harris is a "trusty" Wikipedia editor (reviewer and rollbacker,) with over 2500 edits to 700 unique pages as of February 2013.

Published works
























Selected television documentaries