Fry on Teh Interwebz

[DanaC]

Amongst other things, Stephen Fry is a self-confessed geek and lover of teh interwebz. In a BBC interview he talked about various aspects of internet culture, including Twittering (his is the second most popular Twitter feed i the world, after Obama).

I picked this bit out though as particularly interesting, given recent discussions about net security (net nannying laws) and net freedom; Stephen on the dark side of teh inyterwebz:

This is an early thing I said about the internet at the time things like AOL were still huge. I said it's Milton Keynes, that's the problem with it. It's got all these nice, safe cycle paths and child-friendly parks and all the rest of it.

But the internet is a city and, like any great city, it has monumental libraries and theatres and museums and places in which you can learn and pick up information and there are facilities for you that are astounding - specialised museums, not just general ones.

But there are also slums and there are red light districts and there are really sleazy areas where you wouldn't want your children wandering alone.

And you say, "But how do I know which shops are selling good gear in the city and how do I know which are bad? How do I know which streets are safe and how do I know which aren't?" Well you find out.

What you don't need is a huge authority or a series of identity cards and police escorts to take you round the city because you can't be trusted to do it yourself or for your children to do it.

And I think people must understand that about the internet - it is a new city, it's a virtual city and there will be parts of it of course that they dislike, but you don't pull down London because it's got a red light district.

from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Amongst other things, Stephen Fry is a self-confessed geek and lover of teh interwebz.

I did not know this. I've been an admirer of his based on some of his BBC radio appearances (especially his Saturday Night Fry series) that I occasionally ran into on the BBC streaming audio service. I'll have to check it out.

[DanaC]

Read his books too. He's a brilliant writer.

[Kaliayev]

Twitter is an utter abomination. The only reason I can think of not to strike it from the history of the world is because of Stephen Fry.

[DanaC]

*chuckles* I don't participate myself. I have enough trivia in my life without adopting other peoples'

That said, as a phenomenon I think it's fascinating. I'm currently studying the development of autobiographies and other forms of life-writing. One of the cultural developments that ran alongside that was the idea of the individual. The individual with their own individual soul and their own individual relationship with God drove much of the early (16th and 17th C) lifewriting; most of them concentrated on the individual's spiritual journey. It was a very limited and prescribed form of individuality.

Then this becomes decoupled from faith and the idea of the economic and political individual begins to rise. Even so, it was still a very prescribed form of individuality: individuality as archetype, as lesson, as moral frame. What's intriguing is the entrance of many non-elite voices into this milieu. Generally those non-elite voices are explicitly so: working-class heroes; grammar-school boys come good; the heroic journey from humble beginnings, through trials and tribulations to a successful end point.

Obviously the technological driver behind these developments was the increasing ease of printing and publication. Look around now and there are all kinds of people writing all kinds of auto-biography and memoir. The minutiae of life is there in print, as are deep analyses and expressions of individual experience.

So here we are in the net age and lifewriting has become instant, scrolling, interactive and flexible in nature. The biggest secrets and tiniest details of the most splendid and least regarded lives are all there. Autobiography and life writing, rather than being produced and then read, is instead derived from an ongoing dialogue between author and reader, but with the distinctions between those two roles almost entirely subverted by the medium.

[Undertoad]

Great post D.