Stephen Fry Urges Young To Flee 'Dystopian' Social Networks 270
An anonymous reader writes: English writer, presenter and activist Stephen Fry has urged his fans to abandon social networks, comparing such platforms to 'dystopian' forms of government seen in 1970s sci-fi films such as Logan's Run and Soylent Green. In a 2,600-word essay, the comedian, who had over four million Twitter followers prior to deleting his account in February, also compared the 'surveilled conformity' of social media to the unreal state of society depicted in The Matrix. "Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies -- once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers," he writes. "Well, if you're young and have an ounce of pride, doesn't that list say it all?"
But (Score:5, Funny)
But, but, but... without social media how can I create a fake version of myself to make all of my "friends" envious so they Like me?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:But (Score:4, Interesting)
That requires crippling debt. Today's young are already crippled by more debt than they can ever pay off in their life times
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Or you could just be a decent person. It doesn't require any money.
This won't achieve GGP's stated goals.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure how it is in the US, but one problem h
Bad data (Score:3)
Many young people are not buying houses, and many are not able to afford rent on their own. The amount of adults living with parents today has skyrocketed from 30 years ago. The amount of renters and shared rent agreements has also skyrocketed in that same time.
College loans of 35K are certainly not high, but if you don't make enough money to live on you are going to pay the minimums.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, getting a degree in something useful instead of "Liberal Arts" or "Basketweaving" is a good start to helping your financial security
Re:But (Score:5, Informative)
Today's young are already crippled by more debt than they can ever pay off in their life times
The US national debt is over $160,000 [usdebtclock.org] per taxpayer. Great gift to our kids to go with their college loans. Unfunded liabilities are over $850,000 per taxpayer, so just over a million total. I'm sure today's youth will get right on paying that while I'm in retirement. (And yet, suggest on /. that maybe we could spend a bit less and someone will reply asking "why don't you move to Somalia", as if the extremes were our only choices.)
Another fun stat: the total value of all assets in America is slightly less than the total of various government debts and unfunded liabilities. This will inevitably end in "but though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy," which is actually good news for those under crippling personal debt, as enough inflation fixes that problem.
Re: (Score:3)
Plenty of people who make $60,000 a year are able to handle a $200,000 mortgage, for example--so why shouldn't a country be able to handle a debt commensurate with its income?
Because your analogy isn't numerically accurate. Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
Thus, we can never default on the debt because we can print more money.
"We all had plenty of money, but there was nothing our money could buy"
ut in the late 2000s and early 2010s we effectively printed trillions of dollars with our quantitative-easing program
Nope, we didn't add anything to the money supply, because bank reserves on deposit with Fed increased at roughly the same rate that QE printed money for the government to spend. The other shoe still hasn't dropped for QE. This was an innovative idea by the Fed (real
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
That's better than a median-income Californian buying a median-priced home in California, so I guess that entire (most populous in the country) state is fucked.
Also, the national debt is only about one year of mean income per citizen, so if we were to tax all citizens (why are there so few taxpayers compared to citizens anyway?) -- proportional to their income of course, so as not to burden the already-overburdened -- this would not be an issue at all. Charge every citizen 2% of their income and the debt will go away in one working generation (50 years, i.e. people just starting working when it's implemented would retire just as it was finished). And since we'd do that progressively of course, proportional to their income, only people in the 75th percentile (the mean income is about double the median) would actually pay that 2%, three quarters would pay less (most of them much less), and the slack would be taken up by those who can more than afford it at the very top.
Re: (Score:3)
Get some unlimited web hosting for the cost of a about one cheap meal a month, install free blog software on it, and craft your fake online persona there, where you control the information, not Facebook/Twitter/whoever.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Make a Slashdot account and post comments designed to be modded +5 Funny.
Additional reading (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
What in your view qualifies someone as a security researcher?
Re: (Score:2)
Schneier is NOT a prominent security researcher.
What in your view qualifies someone as a security researcher?
"Kids today, and the computer security research they read! It's garbage! In my day, it was diffrerent. Babe Ruth, now, there was a real security researcher! And let me tell you, you can bet the Great Bambino never wore his pants down around his thighs, or tried to pass off mere cryptography theory as operational security best practices!"
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Whatever his credentials, I learned a lot of things reading his blog, including new ways to think about security. Whether this marks him as useful or me as hopelessly naive is left as an exercise to the reader.
Re: (Score:2)
Duh, if their name becomes prominent it means they fucked up badly.
Prominent security researchers might have handles and live behind seven proxies.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
alternative solutions for a parent to share pictures
I use email. More specifically yahoo and/or gmail. Both have image drag and drop.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing Fry decries is the nature of connections and communication and advertising in the mainstream social networks. Instead of making useful statements in paragraph form, we make short assertions that are mostly meaningless and then waste hours checking statuses, responding to two sentence comments on our two sentence comments, and arguing over the latest Star Wars movie or Hillary Clinton or similar
Re: (Score:2)
These people have not offered an alternative solutions for a parent to share pictures of her children with those who would be interested, such as close friends and family.
They probably think that everyone already knows about email. I suggest you also familiarize yourself with the technology. Most celphones also have something called SMS messaging that can transfer images.
Social networks are a tool (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
To some extent, sure. But the medium is the message [wikipedia.org]
As explored in Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massage [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The irony (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot is a social network.
Social networks are what you make of them. I have not read his essay, ....
Social networks are just noise. It's just people all screaming in the net to have their uninformed two-bit opinions heard and their pathetic little lives recognized.
Social media is just like an addictive drug [youtube.com] but worth less.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: The irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it ironic? The people who have accounts are the target audience.
Re: (Score:3)
I would argue that you are incorrect.
It's not the social part, but the NETWORK part.
There is minimal, if any benefit to the USER of networking your blog/web page with your email, games, music, online comments, and other social activities etc.
But the network itself gets huge advertisement based financial rewards for doing so.
This means that social networks by definition are an exchange of minor convenience (single login) for a major privacy invasion. As such, they are not and never have been what you make t
Re:Social networks are a tool (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Social networks are a tool (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything you type to your friends, you "share" with facebook and advertisers. Things like your thoughts, your opinions, your ideas, your desires, your beliefs, etc. Facts like your birthday, your financial state, your location, your health.
Knowledge is power, and facebook and advertising companies have a lot of power over people.
Re: (Score:2)
Their misuse is the issue, not their existence.
Couldn't the same thing be said about heroin?
Re: (Score:2)
And why can't email and/or instant messaging be used instead?
Re: (Score:2)
For one thing, a lot of my friends and family are on Facebook, and I'm not going to communicate with them well by email or IM. For another, I'm bad at keeping up distance relationships like that, and I enjoy finding out about friends and family I otherwise would not keep up with.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL. You are still being data mined, at least by Facebook (and the government).
Just now I'm doing a showcase with facebook data... it's crazy what's in there, even if you "don't share".
Re: (Score:2)
I don't click on ads
In Soviet Russia, ads clicks on you!
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry the message I got from the summary was advertisers want you to use social media because buy more crap.
Re: (Score:2)
Social networks are a tool - Yep!
Social networks are what you make of them - Not exactly...
They are a tool alright, but not a tool for you! You are the product, not the client. Make of it what you want (you may be able to extract some utility for yourself), but that bit won't change.
Re: (Score:2)
And people who use social networks are tools.
The Universe really does balance itself!
Hell is Still Other People (Score:3)
Don't know His Fryness? You miss out: a good man, even outside his more well-known TV comedy roles. Attracts a lot of the nastier sort of internet trolls who want to make him attempt suicide again.
Much of the internet is a nasty place, and I would not want to live in it full-time. A trolling of some innocent can make me incoherent. A nasty piece of porn can put me off humanity altogether; if they are having fun, why does no-one ever smile? Gaze into 4chan and beyond, and see Hell. But if you totally unpl
I need to get off my ass and... (Score:2)
I need to get off my ass and set up a set of GNU Social and Diaspora nodes and experiment with some of the distributed/federated social networking. I realize a lot of it is broken with many projects being abandoned or merged, but I feel like I should find what's out there that works and try to get people on other social networks I'm on to migrate. If I can get a subset of just a few people to actively use an alternative, I'd be encouraged to help develop for those platforms.
Unfortunately I have two other ma
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What we need is a concerted effort to develop Free Software distributed/federated/p2p alternatives to all the major centralized services. Not just social networks [diasporafoundation.org], but even things like search [yacy.net].
Re: (Score:2)
Last I heard, Diaspora had some technical requirements that would make it difficult for a non-techie to install. Is it easier now?
Not just social networks (Score:5, Interesting)
Try living without a credit card and you will be interrogated and detained every time you come back through customs. Absence of information is very suspicious. Obviously we are hiding something.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm. I've been through US customs before, and I've never been asked to present a credit card for anything...?
Re: (Score:2)
I dont have a credit card, have travelled quite a lot, and have never had that problem.
I have a mortgage and have had car loans though, maybe something like that is enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How is using a gift card or debit card better than using a credit card? (For the privacy purposes this article is concerned about; obviously you can't spend yourself into a hole without credit, but you can use credit responsibly, too, at which point it's basically a debit card).
Smart Phones and Schools (Score:5, Informative)
This reminds me of a related issue. Apparently every teenager, except for my daughter, has a smart phone. This is assumed to such an extent that the high school teachers regularly incorporate their use into their lessons. At first they don't believe my daughter when they ask her why she isn't participating and she informs them that she doesn't have a phone (a few have actually sent her to the office for lying to them about not having a phone). Once she convinces them that she really doesn't have a phone they regularly berate her for messing up their lesson plans. I've complained to the school authorities, who assure me that a phone is not required, but to no avail. It is astonishing to me that the teachers can't comprehend that a teenager might not have a smart phone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This is assumed to such an extent that the high school teachers regularly incorporate their use into their lessons.
When we registered my daughter in highschool we had to tick off a box saying whether she had a laptop or tablet that would be provided for her to use at school. I think all of her classmates have something too. I think if we'd ticked the no box, the school has a small supply of tablets they give out as loaners.
A phone is not required. And I find it doubtful your daughter actually needs a *phone*.
It is astonishing to me that the teachers can't comprehend that a teenager might not have a smart phone.
Every school district is different. But in ours, it *would* be pretty unusual for a student not to have a device.
Re:Smart Phones and Schools (Score:5, Informative)
The school here made Facebook mandatory and they add more homework after what I considered bedtime. They also introduced the (mandatory) ability to upload the homework to the teacher. All this totally screwed my ability to filter/block to ensure a good night's sleep. On top of that, they made bringing a laptop to school mandatory as well as a net connection at home. Smartphones aren't used for teaching, but not owning one is justified reason for bullying according to some teachers.
Back when I went to school, we used this thing called books and notebooks were made out of paper. You gave the assignments to the teacher at the start of the lecture and at the end, the teacher wrote the homework on the blackboard. After the teacher left, the homework would not be changed. There were no requirements to bring anything other than pencils and erasers. It was a wonderful setup as you could plan what you would do in the time where you were not at school and it would not suddenly be changed because some teacher decided to give homework for Monday at 7 PM on a Sunday. Using those crude learning tools, I learned enough math and physics and stuff to become an engineer. You know, I actually had to learn math and calculus using pen and paper, not some app where I would be lost without it.
And don't get me started with Common Core. Common Core math seems to be designed to avoid understanding the underlying math.
Re: (Score:2)
How is this different from the school requiring you to buy textbooks for your daughter? Technology is advancing, and the ways we teach kids should adapt to that.
Re:Smart Phones and Schools (Score:4, Informative)
- No one is going to want to steal a textbook
- A textbook can't do any of the things on the internet that a parent might also forbid
- A textbook doesn't distract from classes or learning or face to face social activity
- When it is lost or destroyed, a textbook is significantly cheaper to replace than a smartphone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Smart Phones and Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
For the sake of my education, could you explain to me how many people are in your country, how many of those people have high speed internet at home, how many have a phone number of their own (not shared by their household), and how many have an income?
I think you'll find an interesting disparity between the answers to these questions and your assumptions about what is "essential" to "modern life." Often times hype and trends do not equal necessity. Many people don't have a car, long thought to be required for getting a good job, or own a suit, or have a college degree, or any of the other things our silly media outlets proclaim to "know" are necessary from their bubble.
Just two weeks past I met a woman who did not have a debit card. She looked as happy as anyone else working at the company I had to write a check to. Perhaps you should go meet people like them and explain to them why their adult life is missing things essential to the happiness and prosperity you think they don't have.
Re: (Score:2)
If you truly do not care about the education of your daughter, by all means provide her with the same learning materials as kids in the very poorest areas so as to replicate the dearth of technological education or direct access to knowledge the poorest of children enjoy.
Though I think YOU would be surprised at how many kids even in poor areas have smartphones...
A debt card is a very different thing than a smartphone; the debt card is a way or more quickly draining something from you, the smartphone a way t
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of people in my country have these things, which means that, to participate in everyday activities, people need some of them. It used to be that you'd find job listings in the newspaper, or by looking around at the companies, but now they're primarily on the Internet. It used to be that, if I wanted tickets to an event, I could go to a spot in my favorite department store and deal with a human. Currently, that human is gone and I'm expected to buy such tickets on the Net.
Many people don't have a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a good thing. She'll learn independence and self-actualization. We already have plenty of sheep.
Re: (Score:2)
7F21: Three Men And A Comic Book
Bart: Please Dad!
Homer: No!
Bart: Please Dad!
Homer: No!
Bart: Please Dad! (And so on...)
Homer: No!!! Now look son we all know that usually when you bug me like this I give in, so I'm not mad at you for trying. It shows you have been paying attention. But we all know I'm not going to give you 100 dollars! Now are you going to stop bugging me?
Bart: No!
Homer: Are you?
Bart: No!
Homer: Are you?
Bart: No!
Homer: Are you? (And so on...)
Bart: OKAY!!
I don't know who... (Score:5, Insightful)
When things like MySpace first came out, then FB, etc, and I started hearing from people, from institutions, from businesses, schools, everything, that I HAD to have an account on those networks, that struck me as wrong.
Now, ten plus years later, I feel that way even stronger than when FB and the rest first showed up.
When I started seeing access to things like Public Television/Radio stations, etc being FB only I knew something was very wrong.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
a 2,600-word essay in 2016?!? (Score:5, Funny)
someone wrote a 2,600-word essay in 2016 and expects people to read it? can't he do an infographic?
Stephen Fry == Awesomeness (Score:5, Insightful)
Common Sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
For one, you should be able to extract all of your data, permanently delete it from FB, and import it to another social network of your choosing. Data should be free to move to/from between social networks.
That is half the reason I don't join.
They own everything.
Re: (Score:3)
Not needed (Score:2)
They began leaving when peepaw and meemaw befriended them years ago,
If you are just tuning in... (Score:2)
Stephen Fry has *always* been a pompous jackass. For example, the entire premise of QI is "Stephen Fry gets to demonstrate how much smarter he is than you".
He is quite entertaining, but that does not mean he is not also a jerk.
et tu, internet? (Score:2)
Is it ironic or sad that he announced this by posting to his website?
Shouldn't he have just sent this in a letter to everyone he knew?
Re: (Score:2)
Websites and social networks are not the same thing.
Well, in some sense they are -- there's not really anything a social network provides the user that a private website wouldn't -- but in the same sense that your private bedroom and a cot in a shelter are both "the same thing".
Pandora's box (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot is a computer blog, not a social network.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been saying it for years now with only 8 words:
"Yet another reason not to be on FaceBook"!!
Re:No mor Frist Psots (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet I see no reason to not be on facebook after reading it.
I do not know what the problem is. My political views have not been changed by Facebook. I admit it makes me disappointed at the views of some of my friends. Advertisers? Yea look at my feed and you will see I like computers and motorcycles. I really do not mind seeing ads for those things.
HR? Yea I am an old married guy that goes to dinner with my wife.
What do I get out of it? I get to see pictures of my friends kids and I get to keep in touch with friends that live far away from me.
I get on Facebook maybe once or twice a week and post a lot less than that since my life is go to work and go home most of the time.
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't always just what YOU do on FB...but your associations.
You have friends, who have friends who have friends..etc.
Who knows what 2 or more generations down on the friends associations might have people doing?
They might not be quite as vanilla as you in lifestyle, behavior, criminal records, watch lists...as you are.
Stuff does matter like that on security investigations for jobs with clearances and the like.
And frankly, I like to
Re:No mor Frist Psots (Score:5, Interesting)
> The importance of "not being seen" so to speak.
I hate to say it but I think it's fast approaching the time where those who make the effort, those who consider the importance of not being seen, actually start to stand out more because of their lack of presence and activities.
I'm not in a position where I particularly give a shit about it. However, I could see it being problematic, down the road, if you appear to be a recluse. Surely, you must be a deviant or hiding something! (I'm guessing that's what people will think.) It is seemingly more and more abnormal for people to not have a web presence of some type, that's identifiable by name.
It's nice to just be able to say, "Screw off." I'm not so sure that most can do that. I read stories about people who claim that they've been turned down for jobs for lack of a social media presence but so far nobody has actually convinced me that this is true. They've not given me any reason to think they're using it as anything other than a crutch to blame their not getting hired. It's not like it's a protected class but none of them have indicated that they were told, directly, that they were not getting the job due to a lack of social media presence. (I'm not big on accepting things without some evidence.)
At some point, the question is going to (likely) be for some people; "Do I put up a bit of fake/light content to at least appear to be active in social media and at least try to maintain some control over what data then gets added?" Your point about the extended network, however invalid it should be, is also very valid. I imagine that we're all within one or two people from knowing some pretty poorly behaved people. Hell, some of us might even *be* the poorly behaved person. I've seen a few people here identify as felons and I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.
You know...
That does make me think... If you didn't like someone then it'd be easy to create a fake social media account for some particularly bad person (though not one too famous) and then insert yourself into a number of their friends lists on multiple sites and through multiple ways - enough to make it appear that there's a connection even though there is none and there may be no such person. Slashdot, for example, enables me to add you to my friends list and there's jack shit you can do about that.
As an aside, and a petty aside at that, I consider it a badge of honor when someone adds me to their foes list for what they felt was a meaningful reason. I can usually tell which post(s) it was that I'll have made that encouraged them to do so. I'm often quite proud of holding those views and I'm quite comfortable holding those views up to scrutiny. If they're unable to find flaws and have to resort to, "Well then I just don't like you!" Then it means I'm on the right track.
I'm not exceptional, by any means, but I am one of those people who holds their views up to inspection and is willing to change their mind when they're presented with new information. I'll even *gasp* admit when I'm mistaken but I'll also so that I'm sorry if I am sorry. So yes, yes it *does* strike me as a badge of honor when I click that notification and see someone's added me to their foe list. I'm not sure what I'm winning but I'm winning something! Oddly, quite a few of 'em end up removing me from their foes list. That was really strange when I first saw that happen but it has happened quite a few times. Sometimes I wonder if they're just not able to understand what I write? I'm too verbose and not very articulate. It's actually something I sort of work on.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And I should take someone that calls people names like a 12 year old seriously?
It is simple. Keep your private life private. Being a sheep means that one follows the herd. That is one thing that I do not do. I have chosen a lifestyle for myself that is actually rare today. I don't drink or do drugs at all. I am married to my wife and we are both faithful. I get my news from VOA and NPR and do not support Trump, Clinton, Sanders, or Cruz for president. I will vote for Clinton over Trump if it comes to that b
Re: No mor Frist Psots (Score:2)
Original thought? Someone who calls others "sheep" is hardly original.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep.
Why not use it at all? Just use it reasonably and don't post every single thing you do every second of every day....
Re: (Score:2)
It's just so sad that this fancy forum or the webby iteration of advertisement voyeurism AKA Facebook is being "discovered".
Once upon a time if you used a computer you were a nerd. IRC chat? social reclusive nerd!, BBS? sad lonely geek! -what was missing was a fancy GUI! and some pictures!! Oh how the monkeys like to look. Look, I am a monkey but I have a can and a stick and bang and bang so loud. ENVY ME.
Now it's cool. Now it's weird if you don't have a computer, if you're not on Facebook. What are you
Re:No mor Frist Psots (Score:4, Informative)
You know... You're probably right - you probably could lose your job for that.
You know... It might be worth having a meaningful discussion about legislating that non-criminal political activity is a protected class. You *should* be able to be lawfully politically active and retain your job though, I suppose, there would need to be some sort of balance to that as people are prone to wanting rights and liberties without accepting responsibility and accountability.
It would probably be hard to strike a meaningful balance, one that is politically viable in the current climes, and actually find the sweet spot. That's gonna need some thinking and is going to need input from other people. I've never really thought about it but it sure as hell seems like that should be something you're granted some protections for. At the same time, I'm pretty big on contracts and willful negotiations between two or more consenting adults and doing so with as little government encroachment/enforcement as is logical to accept.
That's a tough one and I don't say this often enough but it's sometimes good to have the ACs around. I've never been one to suggest they be barred but I've seen others who absolutely abhor the idea of people posting anonymously. Truth be told, the function is often used to less than stellar results. But...
Then there are times like this - which is why I'm a proponent and allow for it at my own sites. There are times when ACs say things that make you think about things you might not otherwise have considered. They're sometimes able to say things they would not be able to say without the benefits of anonymity. It's why I strongly support accepting the inferior AC posts and outright abusive AC posts.
But, I do not often say thank you. Or at least not often enough do I say so. So thanks. You've given me some mental bubble gum - it's a bit of a crossroads with my ideals and it's actually a more defining statement than one might think - where one comes down on the side of this sort of thing. Non-criminal political activity should have some protections. Those protections have been, largely, anonymity in the past - if you wanted. Or at least obfuscation and low chance of discovery.
With everything being uploaded, indexed, crawled, and made available for free or for price, that protection is no longer there or no longer as strong. So, do we need government intervention for such protections? It's imperative to keep in mind that it will be that same government deciding the nature of the act and if such is a criminal offense... There's really more to it, when you think about it, than initially appears and I'm not actually sure where I fall. I've never pondered it and I've not actually decided.
Yeah, I'm comfortable saying that I need to think about it a while longer.
But, the point is that your post is actually a good example of the value of anonymity, pseudonymity, and obfuscation-aminimity. (It's a word, I just made it up.) On top of that, your post also brings to light some additional things - like should their be protections for that so that you don't actually have to hide your political ideology and activities? If so, where should those protections come from? Should they be made by you, the employee, before you agree to exchange your labor for money? Should those protections come at the hands of a union? Should participation in that union, and thus funding, be mandatory or voluntary? If it's voluntary then is one obligated to the protections afforded by that union - is one still able to create one's own employment contract? Should that protection come with the force of law and at the barrel of a gun or by means of financial punishments or perhaps removal of one's physical freedoms?
Like I said, if you give it more than just a casual thought, there's more to it than meets the eye. So, thank you Mr. Anonymous Coward. Thank you.
Re:No mor Frist Psots (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot is very much a social networking site. It has user submitted content. It has friends, foes, and journals. It has public lists of who your friends are and shows other friends/foes related to them - in their social network. There's a poorly enabled mechanism for private communication as well as the ability to post in each other's journals.
Slashdot is not only a social networking site but it was among the first social networking sites that gained popularity. I've even met numerous people, in real life, from this very site - including just last New Years.
Re: No mor Frist Psots (Score:3)
Naw, it's a social network comprised of snarky, sarcastic, technically minded people locked in an eternal battle striving to be the most innately intelligent, educated, dismissive and first-past-the-post user. Lately it's been feeling like an MMO, and what a grind. Instead of "kill 10 rats" it's "humiliate 2 noobs".
In fact, while I consider Fry's comments somewhat true but ultimately pointless(logic can no more stop online membership than screaming" bread and circuses!" in front of a sports stadium), Slash
Re: This time, before anyone asks who he is... (Score:3, Funny)
He voiced Jar Jar?
Re: (Score:2)
I recently revisited the 'Jeeves and Wooster' series with my wife (who is not English) after exhorting its brilliant'ness.
Turns out that my memory is rosy, and it's actually kinda dull and crap. I was disappointed in myself. Blackadder on the other hand, stands the test of time (and memory!)
Re:Oh look... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I've got nothing in particular against Stephen Fry, but - I don't think the "young" make up much of his audience in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yep, read the book, it was MUCH better, but I believe the age you had to turn yourself in for "Sleep" was 21.
The crystal in your hand turned colors every 7 years, on your 21st Bday, "Lastday", it would blink. On last day, you got to do just about anything you wanted, but if you were late for "Sleep"...the Sandmen would come to get you.
And, the gun in the book was MUCH more interesting too...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is Stephen Fry a "Daft Twat", or is he more of a "Right Cunt" . . . ?
The two aren't mutually exclusive. He's the third fat slag.
Re: (Score:2)
But blogs lend themselves to essays, ideas, and reflection. Social networks lend themselves to the kind of quick, pointless interactions you get with high school cliques, but at an even faster pace with added advertising. "We've taken everything that was bad about some of your social interactions at age 15, and figured out how to make it worse, and convinced you that it's incredibly desirable."
I don't hide anything. But
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, this has already happened to me several times:
1: A picture of me on Facebook back in 2009 prompted questions at a job interview. 2: I was in a humidor several years ago, just looking around. Friend of mine took a picture of me. A week later, my insurance company called, demanded a physical with bloodwork, or else I had to pay smoker's rates. 3: A USENET post I did to sci.crypt back in 1991 was brought up at another job interview. Thankfully even then, I made sure to be careful what I wrote. 4: I was asked about a post in comp.sys.mac.advocacy back in 1992. 5: I was asked if I were a lawless hippie because I posted often to the cypherpunks list back in 1994.
The Net has a long memory.
Reason #1 not to use your real name if your name isn't a very common one.
Or to use Google+
Re: (Score:2)
I also care!
As an ex-pat Brit, I caught a few episodes on Dave a year or so back and I find it *Actually* Quite Interesting!
There's factoids and funny bits all through it - you can't find anything like it on 'merikan television (or at least I can't with my cable line-up).
Full Disclosure: I liked Blackadder, that Laywer program he came out with, Jeeves and Wooster (when it came out, less so now), Peters Friends and that Anonymous film he did.. :)
Re: (Score:2)