Ray Bradbury Dismisses Internet as "Distracting" and "Meaningless"

Daily Tech ^ | June 25, 2009 11:45 AM | Jason Mick (Blog)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet`.  It’s distracting.  It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere."

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[nickcarraway]

Something Click-ed This Way Comes

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Ray Bradbury is right. Anything created by Al Gore is suspect in my mind.

[Cringing Negativism Network]

By this logic, books then, are simply paper.

[EternalVigilance]

And ironically, I never would have had the benefit of Mr. Bradbury’s opinion without the internet.

[ottbmare]

Who would have thought that a man who seemed so able to envision the future could have so completely missed the meaning of the internet. It is not meaningless or a mere distraction; it is a tool as powerful as the printing press once was. It changes everything, and we are living at the time when it was born.

[null and void]

Something Click-ed This Way Comes

We have a winnah...

[Arthur McGowan]

Who is “George Orson Welles”?

[CzarChasm]

but since the Internet is meaningless, so is Mr. Bradbury’s opinion of it ;-)

[Dallas59]

Well...he's got a point...

White House.gov

[this_ol_patriot]

Such greats as George Orson Welles, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov had already passed away.

Unless you want no wine before it's time it's H.G. Wells or Herbert George Wells as he was known to his momma.

[nickcarraway]

Thanks.

[Arthur McGowan]

I think he meant H.G.Wells. George Orson Welles—Orson Welles—wasn’t a science fiction writer, that I know of.

[StilettoRaksha]

I adore him.

[The Antiyuppie]

“Who would have thought that a man who seemed so able to envision the future could have so completely missed the meaning of the internet. It is not meaningless or a mere distraction; it is a tool as powerful as the printing press once was. It changes everything, and we are living at the time when it was born.”

Well, Bill Gates (who REALLY should have known better) admitted that he didn’t see it coming, either. But I’d say that at 88, Bradbury’s a bit set in his ways now. I met him once in his late 70’s, still a pretty dynamic guy.

I was on the internet, with a PC, in the early-mid 90’s; it took a good amount of money, hard technical skills and sacrificing a goat to get it work (Windows 3.1 had no TCP/IP stack out of the box, as I recall). And when I saw what it could do, I thought that it (and HTML) were the greatest inventions since fire. Too bad I didn’t capitalize on them much.

[JRandomFreeper]

Perhaps he should spend some time on Mars.

/johnny

[this_ol_patriot]

Surprisingly he should marvel at the Internet as it's one of the modern wonders, as close to Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica as you can get today.

[tdscpa]

tdscpa doesn't believe in Ray Bradbury. He is an 88 year old senile idiot.

[Age of Reason]

Bradbury is right.