BBC NEWS | Technology | Stephen Fry: The internet and Me.
This article has excerpts from an interview Stephen Fry gave. He is uncommonly even-handed and gently provocative in his criticisms of both the internet and critics of the internet. Certainly worth reading for a man who personifies the concept that there is no “high” or “low” culture. Only culture.
Finer points:
From a defense of abbreviation: “Read Byron’s letters. Never was a mind more perfectly expressed and yet in this fantastically compressed form.”
On email and the liberation of the voice: Suddenly there’s wit, charm, self-deprecation, self-knowledge, understanding – all kinds of qualities.
It’s a literary form in the most basic sense that you’re writing and it’s rather wonderful. The phone will be seen, I think, as a terrible aberration.
On why books will not die with technology: And we love them. I love them. 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.
Lucky Cloud, Your Sky 