It is now becoming apparent that Tim O’Reilly’s vision of the web being “One Ring to Rule Them All” and “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”, is coming apart at the seams as the big media company News Corp and Microsoft join hands to threaten Google and, in turn, Web 2.0 itself.

In “O’Reilly: The Web is at war, and it’s making me sad” (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10399710-36.html), we have seen over the past few months that News Corp has stepped up the stakes in its battle to block Google from indexing content from Rupert Murdoch’s online media titles, and that now Microsoft is said to be willing to pay Time Warner and News Corporation, among others, to make these sources available exclusively through Bing, it’s new search engine.

During this time, and many articles later, Rupert Murdoch has criticised Google for “kleptomania” and has threatened to cut them off from all his online publications. That is not quite as easy as he thinks, though, as nearly a quarter of all traffic to the Wall Street Journal’s website, for example, comes via Google. Microsoft, for their part, is willing to spend up to 10% of its operating income over the next five years, which could add up to a sum somewhere around $US11bn. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, questions the war for the control of the web, which directly contradicts his “interoperable platform” concept.

Not all agree though, as the Economist argues that, “a handful of well-funded and powerful platforms, locked in heated competition, could be better for consumers and generate more innovation than Mr O’Reilly’s vision of an internet made of many ’small pieces loosely joined’.”

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001 was a turning point for the web and, with it, the concept of “Web 2.0″ was born. Its web pioneer Tim O’Reilly warned an audience at a recent Web 2.0 Expo that he thinks “we’re headed into another ugly time”, meaning that the corporates are ganging up on Google’s dominance, with Rupert “Dr Evil” Murdoch leading the charge and threatening to pull News Corp’s content carpet from under Google’s feet.

In the same CNet article, it says that: “O’Reilly’s attitude isn’t ‘bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you’re at it’. Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he’s willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all.” Rather like Stalin dressed up in a Winnie The Pooh fancy dress outfit, maybe?

But with all fancy dress parties there are reactionaries in the mix, as Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb announced: “Setting aside the boo hoo, the internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud…”

All this aside, it is becoming clearer by the day that the web is heading into a full-frontal period of bloody competition that could kill the concept of the web’s interoperability as we know it today.

In radar.oreilly.com, Mr O’Reilly clearly states that: “And so we’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopaedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network…

“It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.”

In a postscript, he predicts that: “Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.”

Last night my friend was again giving me a ticking off for not having looked at his beloved TED website. Today, though, I did. The videos on its home page display an array of interesting subjects, but the one that caught my eye was Stefana Broadbent’s discussion on the universal use of IM, texting, Facebook and Twitter and the “spoiling of human intimacy”.

As an opener, let’s look at this lady’s credentials and then find out what she has to say on the subject: Stefana Broadbent is a digital ethnographer who, over the past twenty years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities in the workplace and at home to monitor the changes in social practices. Her TED biography describes her as: “a cognitive scientist, [who] has spent decades observing people as they use technology, both at home and in complex workspaces such as air-traffic control towers…that speaks volumes on the way we think about our relationships.”

Here I summarise five main aspects of Stefana’s research:
•    A typical user spends 80% of his or her time communicating with just four other people;
•    People use different communications technologies in distinct and divergent ways;
•    There has been a diminution of voice communication and an increase in written channels;
•    Instead of work invading our private lives, our private communications are now invading the workplace;
•    People in general do not like to work while on the move: hotel rooms and airports are not valued as appropriate environments for substantive work and are mainly used for email.

Based on her in-depth research about the changing relationship between work and social relationships that has irreducibly altered, there are now around one billion people in continuous technological contact. However, as Ms Broadbent’s research shows, up to eighty percent of these exchanges, regardless of the channel, are with only five people.

Among the psychological community, the worry is that these new forms of communication has led to emotional dependence, which for the obsessive is perhaps true; while the concerns of the sociologists are that “tele-cocooning” has bred a “retreat from public engagement”. Personally, I enjoy extreme use of communications technology during my time at work and then leave it alone entirely (except for the mobile in arranging venues with friends) and then enter entirely into verbal dialogue in the evenings and at weekends. What, may I ask, is so dependent and introverted about that?

Thankfully, I work for my own company so I can choose what method of communication I like, but that is not the case for the majority whose companies have long been concerned about the excessive use of company time to catch up with people using their own, private, digital space.

In Ms Broadbent’s video, she points out that workplaces, administrations and schools have for a very long time set limits and regulations on the amount of time employees are permitted to use devices and websites to communicate with their friends and family.

Being that an employee is paid to be there, that comes as no great surprise. But introducing penalties ranging from confiscation, fines, blocking access to social networking sites, instant messaging, private email accounts and cell phone usage, it all seems a bit stringent in this age of advanced digital communications.

Socially, what seems to be happening is that today’s employees are challenging the need for companies to block their digital interactions, in direct contradiction to company policy that forbids it in order for them to be “productive and effective”. But does that necessarily mean companies are subverting people’s relationships?

Subversion, Ms Broadbent argues, has been going on over the last 150 years, and that the private sphere has always been banned from the workplace. Society in general, she says, has functioned on the inculcating principle that “attention, isolation and productivity” are all interrelated and that employers have enforced these principles so that communications can only be directed towards the external rather than internal. So is it now the case now that private communication is somehow threatening these entrenched “ethical” values of the school and workplace?

The revolution of the personal perhaps started in earnest from the mid-1990s when people started to use email on their PCs, followed by mobile phones. It has since advanced into strands of a social media milieu that so threatens the educational and corporate hierarchies that they have moved to restrict access to such usage. Not in my back yard but I believe what she says is true.

Her research seems to empirically demonstrate that personal communication at school and in the workplace is more about trust than lost production. Perhaps it has always been that way, but haven’t people always found ways to circumnavigate the status quo?

Following all the shenanigans of late about News Corp threatening to put their content behind paywalls and blocking Google from using its content, the last few days have seen them courting Microsoft in a deal where their content would only be found on Bing.

According a story in weblogs.hitwise.com, the two companies are in negotiations for Bing to become the “exclusive indexer” of their news content. All well and good but do the figures add up? The article shows that: “As of last week, WSJ.com’s referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively…The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com’s traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%…Bing, a potential News Corp suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News’ volume…”

The story broke a couple of days ago in the Financial Times’ website, saying, “Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to ‘de-index’ its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.”

One of the more interesting slants on this story is that: “the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.” It appears then that, “Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.”

We all know that the newspaper industry is still trying to construct an online business model that somehow stems the descent of print revenues, but now Microsoft’s deals are being evaluated by antitrust regulators. This is a company desperate to catch up with Google in internet search with the release of Bing this year, as we all know.

With much ado about, well, something, and with other news media outlets all supplying content for free, this deal to block Google in exchange for cash cannot surely be a viable way for News Corp to improve the bottom line for their media outlets? Even more troublesome for News Corp, these deals may not even be legal.

According to DailyFinance.com, several of their legal experts have concluded that: “It could violate anti-trust laws, says to Michael J. Thomas, a principal at the St. Louis law firm Harness Dickey. ‘Anti-competitive behavior is where you’re trying to impair or eliminate someone’s ability to compete against you,’ says Thomas. The fundamental principle is that competition is good for consumers. For Microsoft to pay News Corp (NWS) specifically to withhold its content from Google while making it available to other search engines ’strikes me as more anti-competitive than competitive’.”

The article continues: “Another possibility is that Google could argue that, by inducing News Corp to sever its existing relationship with Google, Microsoft is committing so-called ‘tortious interference’. Typically, that’s when two parties have a contract and a third party induces one of the two to breach that contract. [Although] there’s no contract that entitles Google to index News Corp’s stories, Google could make a case that its longstanding access to those articles creates a ‘valid business expectancy’, which in some instances is sufficient to allow a tortious interference claim to go forward.”

Even if the antitrust lawsuits give Microsoft the green light, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has said before: “In general these models [paying for online content] have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity. So my guess is for niche and specialist markets…it will be possible to do it but I think it is unlikely that you will be able to do it for all news.”

It is highly unlikely that other online publishers will follow Mr Murdoch’s lead or they would have done so by now, but it looks likely that the Microsoft-News Corp deal is an attempt to undo the big men of search. Some hope.

On its release last weekend, the Hollywood doomsday blockbuster “2012″, the ultimate disaster movie, has caused a storm at box offices. Latching on to the world’s climate change concerns, the film suggests the world will end on 21 December 2012 at the end of a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar. The story is a disturbing marketing ploy on the part of the filmmakers, but is it a portent of Man’s future?

The hype cycle of the film “2012″, working full tilt, about the Earth’s impending destruction has been so powerful that Nasa representatives have been shunted out to appear on American talk shows to reassure viewers that it simply that: hype. However, they have far from soothed the general public’s propensity for panic.

The timing of its release has been impeccable, with only a few weeks left before the Climate Conference in Copenhagen convenes. It is said that the conference, although unlikely to reach international agreement due to perceived unfairness over the burden of responsibility facing the undeveloped world, is essential and that the world’s governments must reach a consensus so that a Copenhagen Protocol can be agreed upon, thereby committing all nations to reduce carbon emissions dramatically to prevent further instability over “global warming” and climate change.

On the ground, however, public concern about doomsday in December 2012 has grown exponentially and is spreading internationally, causing almost mass hysteria.  Indeed, some Mayan and Nostradamus believers, who predict Earth’s ultimate extinction in three years’ time, assert that this date will be the dawn of a new age and “spiritual growth” for survivors. Jokingly, a recent New York Times article mocked these soothsayers with: “It is kind of depressing if you were looking forward to taking a vacation from mortgage payments to finance one last blowout.”

Today, there are literally mountains of conspiracy theories that inhabit YouTube on the subject, most of which suggest an alignment between the Sun and the centre of the galaxy that will bring about a “radical event”, with maximum emission activity storms on the Sun’s surface which will pour out massive subatomic particles, known as neutrinos. All of this, astronomers say, is objectionably absurd, akin the putative black hole at CERN. Moreover, they argue, the Sun and the galactic centre will not coincide, as doomsday theorists would have us believe, in 2012.

The essence of this end-is-nigh school of thought is tied in with predictions that Nibiru, a planet supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. The fallout from this, to paraphrase David Morrison, a CSI Fellow and Senior Scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is that associated attributes to this event encompass a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, create severe solar storms associated with the eleven-year solar cycle, cause the reversal of the Earth’s rotation axis, long with bombardment by large comets or asteroids, and with a fanciful bit thrown into the mix about the Sun aligning with the galactic centre on December 21, 2012, subjecting us to potentially deadly forces.

This now populist theme, based on the Mayan calendar and ways to survive the coming apocalypse, seems to be causing havoc with the minds of the irrationalists and the huge hordes of the psychologically unhinged. According to one website, many people in Russia are saying they are “anxious by problem Nibiru”, with one woman asking: “Why doesn’t your government put a ban on the TV shows and report telecasting about Nibiru and 2012. If [the] US can [take steps] to protect the world physically from terrorism, why can’t it protect us mentally from [this] news, if they are hoax?”

If it’s clearly a hoax, then mentally we should ignore it. However, according to Wiki: “There are a variety of popular beliefs about the year 2012. These beliefs range from the spiritually transformative to the apocalyptic, and centre upon various interpretations of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Contemporary scientists have disputed the apocalyptic versions.”

Whilst the film’s impact on the human psyche is building up to the “event” in 2012, let’s not be too hasty about denying the affects of climate change altogether though. While the world’s leaders assemble in Copenhagen next month, James Lovelock, a respected voice in the scientific community, said in an article in The Guardian newspaper, “Enjoy life while you can”, and talks about the catastrophe that will “inevitably happen” (for the full article see (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange). For interest’s sake, let’s look at some of the extracts:

“Working alone since the age of 40, Lovelock invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.”

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions with consistent accuracy since the 1960s, which have earned him “a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected — if maverick — independent scientists.”

“His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be under water. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language — but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.”

“Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the [Daily] Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, ‘on the face of it, a good thing’. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs.”

Then the pièce de résistance: “There have been seven disasters since humans came on the Earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.” Why then, I plausibly ask, after seven “events” already, weren’t we the source of our ancestors’ optimism?

However, seven disasters already of this magnitude? Is he saying that the micro disaster scenario, that is to be debated by the world’s leaders next month in Copenhagen, is a complete waste of time? Well, I suppose he is, yes.

He argues in the piece that: “Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable. It’s just too late for it. Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing.”

In this quote there is no allusion to a cyclical macro pattern, but in his interview with The Guardian newspaper (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/apr/22/james-lovelock-gaia-space-biochar) he reiterates the coming of the “Eighth Event”:  “Don’t forget that in the Earth’s history, while humans have been on the planet — that’s about a million years — there have been seven major climate events of this kind. And I think the geneticists say that at one of those events, we were reduced to a mere two thousand individuals; a genetic bottleneck. If that is true, then they are very violent events indeed. And the one up ahead looks every bit as violent, if not more so than the ones that have happened in the past…”

He continued: “As soon as the system grows unstable, it goes into positive feedback. And as the positive feedback strengthens, then any small perturbations, in either direction, get amplified. So the tendency to cooling will give you a really cold winter,” he suggests. “More extremes are likely because the system is becoming stressed.”

While the greenists run about suggesting that we all plant trees to alleviate the impact of climate change, he warns: “This is the trouble with climate science and green actions: they theorise all the time and never do experiments. Now, people have seemed to have forgotten that experiment and observation are at least half of science.” When he planted 1,000 trees years ago he found out it really wasn’t a good idea at all, because “you can’t plant an ecosystem”.

So, while the film “2012″ is an obvious and clever marketing hoax — one that is based on the exploitation of human fear in return for quick returns — dig a little deeper into both the micro level (Earth’s biosphere) and the macro level (the course and interaction of all celestial bodies) and the conclusion is that we really haven’t got a clue about what could potentially become reality; unless, of course, you believe in the stern warnings of Mr Lovelock.

Recent articles in the Guardian newspaper have suggested that reality has finally sunk in with News Corp’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, as paywalls have been deferred indefinitely and his charges against free online news have now come crashing down.

As a recent example of charging for online news, the furore over British MP’s expenses bore out the fact that as far as “exclusive” stories are concerned, this scandal was re-reported on many assorted websites that were free, within half-an-hour of the story’s release. So, why would anyone choose to go to the Telegraph website, if it sat under a paywall, when you could get the same information from alternative sources?

Obviously, by setting a date for the advent of paid-for content, Murdoch was hoping that other news corporations would follow suit. But even if he had sat down with all the world’s newspaper execs to hammer out a deal, wouldn’t this have amounted to a cartel, which of course is illegal in most countries.

I have argued for the past few weeks that a report by Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, which promotes speciality publishing in response to declining newspaper revenues, is the correct view of the future of online news. Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, would have found it almost impossible to introduce micro-charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites.

On November 5th, Mr Murdoch admitted, in a report published in the Guardian newspaper that, “last night the schedule was slipping for the start of online charging at papers including the Sun, the Times, the New York Post and the Australian. The initiative, which has divided the media industry, is an attempt to recalibrate the business model for struggling print media.”

In July, Murdoch launched a massive and prolonged attack against the BBC, which can never charge for online news, as it’s a state-run institution. Since that date, his son James has gone into action against the corporation to strengthen his father’s diktat that News Corp was not going to “give news away for free”.

As of last week, he has climbed off of his trusted steed and addressed his audience more honestly, and from the ground, saying that although initially he fully intended to lock his news up behind paywalls from the end of the company’s financial year, ending in June 2010, “I wouldn’t promise that we’re going to meet that date.”

According to the Guardian newspaper: “News Corp revealed an 11% increase in profits to $571m for the three months to September…but [it] continues to struggle with its digital offerings. Murdoch revealed that the social networking website MySpace has failed to deliver on a minimum level of web traffic it guaranteed under an advertising tie-up with Google three years ago. As a result, it will not receive all of the $900m that Google had agreed to pay for the right to offer search and advertising on MySpace.”

So, what are the figures that may have inspired this retreat? And how much advertising revenue does News Corp derive from the average newspaper reader? Well, from buying the physical article, $150; from newspaper advertising, $100; and from the web: a derisory $8.

Another pertinent question Mr Murdoch seemed to overlook as he was attacking the very foundations of the BBC, how much time does the average reader spend on his papers: 12 hours a month in print; 10 minutes a month online, or 1/720th.

The difficulty in understanding both models is that newspapers are tactile and dense to read; online is the opposite. I would be interested in finding out if anyone, anywhere, ever, has read an entire newspaper online. It just doesn’t happen. Also, when you look at the typography of online news (the BBC is a perfect example), journalists write in bite-sized chunks, as we all know that reading dense tracts of text on-screen is too wearing an experience. Therefore, it’s can only be modelled as an add-on, not as an entity in itself.

For as long as newspapers have been publishing online, owners have accepted that charging for it was never going to work, and concluded a long time ago that advertising plus free access was the preferred model. But then came the credit crunch and with it the negative effects on the profits of publishing; and publishers needed to find a way out. Murdoch decided to go back a few paces, if not a hundred miles, in re-introducing the idea of the paywall. Now, it looks as if this re-enactment of the past — one that would never have come to fruition — is quietly being fazed out.

According to another article by the Guardian newspaper: “His Times/Sunday Times duo has dropped off the pace in Britain, adrift of the Mail, Guardian and Telegraph. His New York Post is down to 27th place in the league table of US online news resources. Fox, of course, is a palpable presence, but still trailing Yahoo News by 26 million users a month. How — the Wall Street Journal apart — do you start building paywalls around that?”

Murdoch ran the risk of trying to lead the newspaper industry towards a pay-per-view model when he said: “I believe that if we’re successful, we’ll be followed fast by other media.” He wasn’t, and the deal that has caused such a stir over the last three months seems dead in the water, with Mr Murdoch having been forced, at last, to eat humble pie.

When he said “change was inevitable” and “we’re certainly satisfied that we can produce significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content,” he spoke volumes about how, rather than becoming “the saviour of online news”, he severely miscalculated the market and today’s generation of readers.

So, for now, while the argument for fortress journalism abates, maybe we can return to normal and stop worrying about its consequences. In conclusion, it certainly seems that the Times has not kept pace with the times; and that if the Times wants to succeed in the future, it will have to reinvent itself with the times.

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In a recent development today, the Guardian’s article, Murdoch could block Google searches entirely, where he admits to an “online charging delay” and that “Murdoch’s plan for paywalls ‘raises questions of anti-trust law’”, Murdoch’s lieutenants “have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of ‘kleptomania’ and acting as a ‘parasite’ for including in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google’s search indexes - a simple technical operation - Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.” So, we’ll just have to move left, and leave him to address his “parasite” overlords.

Personally, I use Twitter as a business tool and only tweet stories I write associated with the web. It seems to make little difference commercially, but I continue regardless. So why does a highly intelligent and talented man like Stephen Fry, who recently and publicly declared he was quitting Twitter due to a lame remark that he was “boring”, leaving his near-million followers bewildered and angry, tweet as he does?

The phenomenon of this perpetual, asinine running commentary about mundane events in one’s daily life is baffling, to say the least; and it is not confined to the purview of everyday journeymen and women of the social media circuit, but extends to celebrities such as Stephen Fry which, in turn when controversial, makes social news in heavyweights such as the BBC and the New York Times.

Let me give you a real-life example of the social futility syndrome: the wife of  a friend of mine actually wrote on Facebook today: “Why is it Benson the dog gets to have his nails done, but I am not allowed?” Isn’t it sort of curious why someone would put such a trifling domestic issue out there in social space rather than discuss it with her husband and the dog? Moreover, who really cares?

But let’s then move on to one of Stephen Fry’s entries on Twitter: “A spoonful of paté de campagne Ardéchois à l’ancienne is not really that far distant from a spoonful of catfood. Just notably more expensive.” Odd, isn’t it, when Stephen Fry, a highly respected British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director, writes that? Why does he do it? I just don’t get it.

Last Saturday, a follower of Mr Fry from Birmingham, England, sent him a tweet that said although he “admires” Mr Fry, he finds his tweets rather “boring”. Emotionally flattened by this comment, Fry then threatened to quit Twitter. This provoked a vitriolic attack against The Man From Birmingham by Fry’s followers, who reacted in intense derisory unison like a cackle of hyenas. Stephen Fry then responded to the supposed furore with: “I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.”

@brumplum, in retreat, then replied: “You bet. Thank you for being so understanding. I feel more sheepish than a sheep and more twattish than a twat.” Spat over? No, not at all. What resulted from it were news reports from the Guardian newspaper, the BBC and the New York Times. Doesn’t this simply confirm that not only has trivia become the main focus of interest among social media conscriptees, but personal snipes by the unknown against celebrities are now being carried into traditional media space.

The take on it by tech.blorge.com was that it should be buried and forgotten: “[Social media] seems to be being used by adults to play some spectacularly childish games, with memories of the school playground flooding back as I read the latest tweets. Stephen Fry ended up not quitting Twitter and is back to normal. But the controversy surrounding comments made by one of his followers and the backlash immediately afterwards is rumbling on.”

This story was so far removed from the delicate and benign tweets I’m accustomed to, I turned my attention to rant.com, as that surely would be a site where this type of spat should be centred. The comments on their Twitter account look sensationally libellous, so I daren’t repeat them. Just a thought.

Stephen Fry has lived a colourful life, as extracts from Wiki attest: his maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Slovakia and his mother’s aunt and cousins died in Auschwitz; at seventeen, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend, was arrested and spent three months in Pucklechurch Prison for fraud; later, he gained a degree in English literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge; he has written many books, appeared in numerous television parts and plays and lives in London with his partner, Daniel Cohen.

In 1995 Fry suffered a nervous breakdown while appearing in a West End play Cell Mates and walked out on the production. He went missing for several days and contemplated suicide. It is well documented that he suffers from depression and last year the BBC ran an interview with him titled, “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive”, where he talked about his experience of having a “bipolar disorder” and recounted his suicide attempt after walking out of Cell Mates and the “continuing severe mood swings he has to endure”.

So I can understand his sudden disinterest and dejection when he was attacked on Twitter. But it’s the social fallout of all this that has gone so badly awry; to me, at least, his “followers”, in an almost Biblical sense, reacted in what can only described as psychotic hysteria, akin in essence to Brian’s disciples in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Also, for mainstream media to run stories about an insignificant remark in the rarified ether of the world’s most glorified and celebrated online chatrooms is a particularly disturbing trend.

Fry suggested he was feeling very low and depressed. Whether that is can be attributed to the rogue remark from The Man From Birmingham or not, we cannot possibly tell. But hasn’t Twitter taken on the mantle of a new social media contract; one where misplaced and often innocuous tweets from unknown individuals provoke personal depressions, resulting in rants from “disciples” that fuel a now-important source of information in mainstream media’s social news?

Twitter is not the problem; it’s a platform. But online human interaction these days is decidedly weird.

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ADDENDUM

We’ve all had these moments; moments in which you have formed your opinion and then, by some coincidence, have them turned around by someone you meet or something you read. And last night I had one of those epiphanic moments: I walked in to my local tapas bar and read last Sunday’s Observer. Inside, I came across an article titled “The power of tweets“.

Up till now I just saw Twitter as risible, meaningless outpourings from the “what I had for breakfast” types and wondered why people like Stephen Fry find it so necessary to be involved.

Well, it goes much deeper than catfood, apparently. In the middle of last month, Scott Pack read an article by Jan Moir of the Daily Mail about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately which, he said, was “horrifically homophobic”. So Mr Pack tweeted: “Vile piece of ‘journalism’,” and described her as an “evil cow”. Well, it is the Daily Mail, Scott.

Anyway, then Ben Locker, a copywriter with a 3,800-strong Twitter following, agreed: “Can we get #janmoir trending?” The term I had vaguely heard of before but the hashtag before a word, called “trending”, means it is on Twitter’s list of the 10 most tweeted-about topics on the site.

Pack’s followers re-tweeted, as did his followers’ followers and “within hours #janmoir was topping Twitter’s trending topics…and a ‘Twitterstorm’ was born”. By the end of the day, “the Mail website had amended its headline, companies including Marks & Spencer had pulled their advertising from the offending webpage; and the Press Complaints Commission had received a record-breaking 1,000 complaints (it would later receive 22,000).”

For us lesser mortals, the chances of creating a “Twitterstorm” through an act of “trending” would be impossible (I speak for myself here), but it does go to show how the “Twitterati” can influence social interaction through the power of their thoughts, words and disciples. And I did have to adjust my thinking as to what Twitter is all about — that little old me has no influence whatsoever in this new so-called “new democracy”; that is, unless I join a rent-a-crowd in support of a main actor, I’m doomed. Richard Dawkins, watch out!

But let’s get back to Stephen Fry, who I used as an example in the piece above. In the Observer article he is quoted as saying: “the age of politics as we knew and loved it is now over. Do the two recent big Twitterstorms mark a fundamental ’shift in the very focus of democracy’ – has the Twinternet become the new Fifth Estate?”

The “very focus of democracy”, Stephen? Not perhaps the best dictionary definition in the world but dictionary.com defines it as: “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.” Meaning perhaps “celebrity democracy”?

However, Fry is cautious about its future when he pointed out a potential danger. “Twitter may seem to some to be dominated by bien-pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when those spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism? When the political machines march in and start acquiring millions of followers, giving them the power to close sites?”

Well, of course. He certainly seems to be on-cue here but some are not quite so sanguine: “It’s good for democracy, but it’s not democratic,” says Locker. “Everyone has a say, but not everyone’s say is equal. Don’t kid yourself that people will find your cause more interesting than what Stephen Fry had for lunch.”

Now I did like Spiked Online’s Tim Brown’s take on it when he described it as “a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first-person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence”.

The piece concludes with a leaked internal document from Twitter suggesting: “the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013 and that “we will be the pulse of the planet”. The writer then asks rhetorically: “Is that scary? Answers in 140 characters please.” So there you go, John, the new democratic order of the “Twitcélèbre”. Now I understand.