Stephen Fry: The internet and Me

Stephen Fry was talking technology on Radio 4 yesterday, and some of the highlights have been transcribed here:

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

Since Fry's probably more responsible than anyone else for taking Twitter over the tipping point and into the popular consciousness (in the UK at least), his views are worth having. Among his more piercing points, he talks of web snobbery, and in particular the platform migration of early adopters as the great unwashed swarm in (FB, is for example, now "low rent").

Interestingly, he defends txt spk, pointing out that when paper and ink were expensive in the 17/18C, words were at a premium: "letters were, as they say, crossed. You'd look at them writing horizontally and then there'd be vertical lines all the way down and round the margins. And 'your' is 'YR', you know just as it is in a text. It's exactly the same point - you're compressing." I might also say that compressed language allows quicker expression; literally less time for the word to get from the brain to the page, which helps keep the flow of thought. See also, Pepys' diaries written in shorthand - when the pen was the primary mode of inscription it was the cheapest and easiest way to get words out.

And here, on the metaphysics of presence, he talks of being able to have a proper conversation by email because all the bodily interaction is absent: "As I talk to you now, and as one talks, especially to strangers, all the terrible problems of class, differences in education, race and gender all have their part to play in the embarrassment of real life conversation, but the moment one's let loose with a keyboard or a pen you can express yourself properly." The writer A.S. Byatt made a similar point at the Digital Lives conference I attended last month. There she said that she preferred to give interviews via email, because there “you can have a real conversation.” All of which perhaps flies in the face of Dreyfus' worries about telepresence and the absence of bodies; maybe I need to read Derrida after all, which is something I'd been trying to avoid.

Later, a riposte to the dystopians: "I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn't congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel - about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead."

Good stuff.