Stephen Fry On The Internet

This is a small diversion, but I have just read a BBC item on a BBC Radio 4’s Analysis interview with Stephen Fry entitled The internet and Me. It will be broadcasting shortly or you can download the programme’s podcast.

Stephen Fry, the celebrated wit, writer, raconteur, actor and quiz show host, is also a self-confessed dweeb and meistergeek. His take on the Internet is superb as a rapid Cook’s Tour of what the Internet is all about. Here are some of the topics, with short quotes on each.

ON TWITTER: At the time of going to press I’ve got 103,000 Twitter followers, which means I’m getting new “Tweets” all the time. And some of them are very amusing and some of them are rather silly but most of them are entirely charming. I’m not someone with press offices and all that kind of thing, but those like me in the public eye who have, have discovered it’s a magnificent way of cutting out the press. And the press are already struggling enough – God knows they’ve already lost their grip on news to some extent. If they lose their grip on comment and gossip and being a free PR machine as well, they’re really in trouble.
WHY THE WEB NEEDS A RED LIGHT DISTRICT: 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.
HOW TO BE A WEB SNOB: There are very basic elements of class snobbery that apply in the web as they do everywhere else. If someone’s email address is hotmail or AOL, you kind of think “Hmmn, I see, they’re not a real player, are they?”
IN PRAISE OF TXTING ABBRVTNS: You look at a letter written by a 17th or 18th century letter writer, and you’ll see far more abbreviation. Lord Byron would appreciate the poetic potential of text messages. There’s barely a word that isn’t compressed because paper was expensive and ink was expensive, and to get your letter franked cost a lot of money – a Member of Parliament or member of the aristocracy were the only people who could do it. Read Byron’s letters. Never was a mind more perfectly expressed and yet in this fantastically compressed form.
WHY EMAIL LIBERATES THE VOICE: It’s a literary form in the most basic sense that you’re writing and it’s rather wonderful. 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.
WHY BOOKS AND THE WEB GO TOGETHER: Books should not be seen as threatened by the rise of the computer. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.
A RIPOSTE TO WEB-WORRIERS: 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.
COMPUTERS AND SPELLING: And so you get rather comic moments where if you see a misspelled word in a book when you’re reading a book, you wonder why it hasn’t got a wavy underline from the spellchecker.
WHY THE INTERNET TURNS US ALL INTO KINGS: Let’s look at the most powerful kings there have ever been ever, the great autocrats or even dictators. In any sense that counts except the power of life over death, I have more power than Louis XVI. I have more power for knowledge and understanding at my fingertips. We are immensely empowered.
WHERE THE WEB CAN TAKE YOU: Imagine if someone like Alan Bennett, for example, who is a prodigious gallery-goer and a great writer occasionally, only tantalisingly occasionally on art – imagine if on your website you just said to these people could you just come in and talk about your favourite painting. What could you learn from this man? It would take them five minutes and you’d just have a little camera on them. There are opportunities and ways of doing it on the internet that are so much more closed to you even in broadcasting, to be perfectly honest.