a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
jadedog  ·  3143 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Stephen Fry's Blog post on Social Media.

It was an fun read on the retrospective of computers and the internet. I had to smirk at his last paragraph. After all the bravado of talking about writing letters, walking to meet people face to face and all of that, he writes at the end that he hasn't given up email, text or the cloud. He's only given up most of social media.

That's not a brave new world. Many of the people without social media or those who are not on the grid are those who never got on the internet.

He also makes it sound like a call to arms, but he doesn't seem to realize that his position in all of it is pretty advantaged and unique. Other people didn't have a twitter account with millions of followers. He got that through his fame unrelated to social media.

He also doesn't explain why the internet would get mean when the politicians, media and corporates got involved. They may shape the backdrop, but they're not the ones adding the twitter comments.

I get that he feels like social media has become sheeple-like which is true of anything that becomes mainstream. But the alternative he gives doesn't solve the problem he's describing.