Twitter and Others
Well known actor, comedian, author and television presenter Stephen Fry's feed on the social networking site Twitter is one of the most popular in the world, BBC reports. He shared with his thoughts why he believes the web is such a wondrous thing on.
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, he said.
If people want to announce their new this or their new that, they're going "I'm not going to do an interview, I'm not going to sit in the Dorchester for seven days having one interviewer after another come to me, I'm just going to Tweet it, and point them to my website and forget the press". 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. For some of us a MySpace page is just pretty low rent. It's a pink, sparkly thing that's very charming for a 14-year-old girl, but a serious adult with a MySpace page has a problem.
And Facebook is becoming a bit low rent too. In the same way, if someone's email address is hotmail or AOL, you kind of think "Hmmn, I see, they're not a real player, are they?" I mean please don't be offended if you're thinking "How dare you - it's a perfectly respectable address", of course it's a respectable address.
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.
The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel - and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadful and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it - again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study. And we hear the cry again.
