STEPHEN FRY

ON
SOCIAL MEDIA
Transcript:

PART 1
There are now people in their mid to getting onto advanced teens, who have never known
obviously err a world without the web. That maybe 20, 20 year, 20 year olds who have
never known anything about that. Have they developed strange thumbs? Do they have
peculiar ways of talking and listening, do their eyes glaze over when they have to
concentrate for more than 30 seconds, no I don't believe any of that. I'm not particularly
negative or pessimistic, about the social qualities, the linguistic qualities the concentration
qualities of generation web as they're called. I honestly believe that if you were to go back
into 1920's and take an ordinary semi-educated 15-year-old and place him next to an
ordinary semi-educated 15-year-old now you would find the one now knows more,
understands more is more socially confident, he's more aware of the rest of the world, it's
more able, and more adept at research erm. may not be able to say the 9 times table as
fluently or repeat amo, amas, amat, amamus, amamtis amant. They may not be able to do
that is that such a great loss to an old- fashioned person like me? I'd love to think people
can do both, but let’s, let's get real about this. Connection is what humans crave, it's what
we are all about and something that separates us from animals it's even pre, it’s, it comes
before the fact that we, we have language, because the language is an example of a, if
you like a mural technology that we have, we have created to answer this need for
connection. We are the social animal par excellence. Or, or by devil err if you like. Err if not
necessarily excellence. Erm we are, constantly in need of, of connecting with people for
friendship, love, sex, knowledge, growth, enmity, territoriality all the, all the imperatives
that drive us as human beings. Erm we've created villages and towns to help us do that
and roads and now we've created something else that allows us to do it, us to do it even
more.

Where people make their fundamental error and criticise all this I think it's a danger and it's
reducing our capacity to act as proper human beings is they think it's all this. You either sit
in front of a screen of some kind tapping away all your life, going lol and, and, and being
childish and not writing in proper English sentences or, you sit in an old-fashioned study
with books and you read properly and you engage property and you go for walks. Well, I
do both! And most people do both, it is not one or the other. Now you may say I've had the
advantage of a classical education, I've grown up in the tradition which I've understood
books and I've understood history and I've been interested in these things, and I like Latin
and Greek and I you know and I like the smell of a proper book and so on. That's true but
I've made quite a lot of online friends I, I don't even know what gender some of them are
err they're people I chat with, you know, I've the personal direct messaging in forums and
err, and Twitter and so on. Some of whom I think are very young, and you can sort of tell
they are, and who astonish me occasionally with their knowledge, knowledge of literature.
In fact, I was having a conversation just the other day with one, who was talking to me
about Evelyn Waugh and I think she's 12 and she seems to have read every book that
Evelyn Waugh ever wrote and have a very intelligent view of this great novelist. And at I
almost wanted to say but how would someone who is 12 like you ever have read these
books and I think what am I saying of course, of course they might have done and spend a
lot of their time on, on a forum as well. It's not, the two are not mutually exclusive.

As social animals which you conjecture we are erm, we now err historically are interactions
our relationships are, tribal capacities would have been walled, they would have been
within the, the physical proximity and now there's the opportunity to out reach via
Facebook via Bebo via whatever social networking means that are available. How do you
think this is going to affect the younger generation growing up if they're able to have
relationships that are purely on line based upon erm, communities practice, or ideals?

The human social history is being filled with inventions and developments and techniques
that have threatened the way we arranged ourselves. A very good example that seems so
peculiar is that Anthony Trollope, the English novelist best known for writing books on
politics and the church, was also a civil servant of err, some importance and he invented
the post box, the pillar box, and he was distraught that his invention might undermine the
Victorian family. Now at first this seems, why, why would it do that? Well until the time the
pillar box arrived, the post box the little red thing we put a letter in, a woman had never
been able to write a letter and get it delivered without giving it either to a post- man or to
her father to be sent. The middle class woman had no ability to connect with a man except
through the graces of her parents particularly her father and Trollope who was a...
although he was, a fine novelist and a and an innovative thinker, was a very traditionalist
and he hated the idea that there were women communicating with men without their father
knowing about it ‘cause they could just slip a letter into a post-box. And similarly if you go
back a little further to the time of Jane Austen, people found the idea of the novel simply
horrific, people could not bear the idea of children sitting around reading. They should be if
they were going to read it would be sermons and history, certainly not novels and they
should be going about the place, sitting up straight and err at dinner parties and err, and,
you know, walking and being healthy and then of course along came radio and people
couldn't bear the idea of people sitting around the radio and then television and then
games and then computers and then and all these things seemed to those who were not
brought up in them somehow to diminish because we're all so proud of our youth. We think
our youth and our childhood are somehow, if not perfect, it was even if it was imperfect it
made us suffer, how dare these children now not suffer the way I did. They should be
having the kind of life I did, made to read, made to do this, they should not have this
freedom, this access, or if they do, while I can approve of it, I ought to suggest that it's
dangerous, that it's going to go wrong.

Well, yeah, I mean some genies when they're let out of the bottle can, you know, can
cause problems and they certainly can't ever go back in the bottle. When cars first arose
people were horrified at the deaths on the road, horrified they couldn't believe it, I mean
there were, there were hundreds of people being, being squelched every day. It was
grotesque and any you know if you just braked in a car at 30 miles an hour you'd kill
yourself on the steering wheel you'd break your neck. People were dying all the time. Did
they say oh that's it then? We can't have cars, sorry. In the same way as if someone says
actually these mobile phones do give out microwaves and they will give you brain cancer
are we going to say oh well that's, that's the end of that technology the? Not on your Nelly!
There's a risk reward ratio here and for us the reward is so great, that whatever the risk is
we try and contain it and understand it at best but what we don't do is say the risk is too
great.
PART 2
The great question about the web is has it democratized, has it become an egalitarian...
.........................................
The great question is whether or not the web is being a force for democratization and
whether it is made us all equal erm, there are those who will say the moment it became
monetized as, this terrible word the way at the moment it became really commercialized,
erm, the moment the large corporations that controlled the pipeline started to buy each
other up, and started to get this huge erm, err mergers, that somehow err the pioneering
spirit went out of it and the freedom died. People would say erm, I'm not quite as cynical
or quite as pessimistic as that, I do genuinely believe there is a, a dispensation in, in
politics in the west that the focus the, the weight of authority has shifted, that it used to be,
the ballot box was the way people expressed themselves.

Now there is no focused way people express themselves on the internet, but I think that is
the next challenge for democracy, is to use the fact that this surely is the way that we can
harness, vox populi, vox dei, the will of the people. It seems to me that it's a real threat to
the established estates as they used to be called, there were the Four Estates in Britain,
the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons. ... and the Fourth Estate as it
was always known. Err, the press, the press has been deeply upset and worried of course
by the, the how err particularly Google and other aggregators of, of content that they have
spent a lot of money assembling, have been able to distribute it freely, in such that people
now regard it as almost their right to have free news err if the, even if they're outside
Britain it's not through the BBC and their, and their licence fee. So there's that side of it
where the press feel somehow their authority is under threat and through things like
Twitter err, and, and Facebook individuals and celebrities and politicians are finding other
mouthpieces, other ways of connecting than newspapers, it used to be that if you were, if
you were a politician or a celebrity wanted to set the record straight or you wanted to sell a
book or something you had to kowtow to the newspaper. Now you don't, you simply ignore
them, I mean if you, you know if you're a big American star you've got over a million
followers. And no newspaper's gonna provide you with the kind of coverage you can
provide yourself and you can control it and newspapers hate that, (a) it speaks to their
contempt for the, for the stupidity and vanity of stars anyway. What we all share, and yeah
about myself and that included naturally. Erm, erm, but (b) it just takes away their power.
So that's, that's the press's worry. And that's why they're always trying sort of, that is a
very uneasy relationship. On the one hand, they mock it, so Twitter which is a good
example, when that arrived, the press said oh no, not ridiculous, fatuous people telling you
what they had for breakfast, oh I did this, look at this Twitter stream by the moronic
celebrity, how boring is that! Two weeks later “join our Twitter stream at Daily whatever”.
You know and such is desperate, desperate to jump on it, absolutely and politicians, there
are dozens of politicians who think oh damn why did I speak, I had to go to Twitter just two
months ago I said it was banal and stupid ............ and now it means I can't have my own
Twitter stream and everyone else has an I'm ohh I'm loosing out. And how, how do I
backpedal here, you know, because through no fault of their own I don't quite see how it
was going to develop. This is the, in microcosm what’s happened with the Internet. And
so, that's the press. Then government, government is, is a much trickier one, it's a much
huger issue.