Ray Bradbury, bro…. what?
From a New York Times interview:
“The Internet is a big distraction.”
“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said. “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.’
“Libraries raised me.”“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.”
Your most famous book was a metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge, or so I thought in high school. The more you talk the more I think it really was just a book about censorship like the paperback back cover synopses I gave a 1.5 hour seminar refuting claimed.
It’s ok that you still think knowledge is a binary choice between print and electronics; books and the internet. After all, you’re pretty old and even a lot (most) of the people I care about thought the same thing until a year or two ago.
Are you defending libraries because one day an electromagnetic pulse could destroy all electronic information? Or do you have some kind of paper and ink fetish?
Whenever my stream of consciousness comes across something I don’t understand, the internet helps me figure it out. Five minutes ago I was sitting at the table eating thousand island dressing and I realized I didn’t know how it was invented. Now I know. It’s not about distraction or trivia or pop culture; it’s a limitless transference of the sum of human knowledge and culture into one’s own brain at the fastest speed one chooses.
The closing university remark just makes you seem senile. The internet is an active system, but as an alternative to academia it can also be a means to find cheap passive learning tools. In the last four months I’ve downloaded five hundred films. In the last four days I downloaded three hundred lecture series from the world’s top one percentile professors (six thousand hours of audio).
C’mon. Stop talking until you pull it together, man.
