Word Soup

I really love this New York Times article in which Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 gets all grandma persnickety about the Internet:

"The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

There's something fairly epic about the author of a landmark book on government's abuse of power completely not comprehending the power the Internet has over said governments. Stupid Internets. Helping Iranians communicate through over and around oppression.

A friend reminds me of an old Douglas Adams quote on the subject:

"1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;...

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really."

That said, his efforts to protect libraries are great, even if his understanding of modern technology isn't. No matter, he can't hear the criticism anyway.