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

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

[Cementjungle]

A pic of my mother-in-law with her birthday card/letter from her friend Ray:

[steel_resolve]

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."

"Now you kids get off my lawn! Judge Judy is coming on in 10 minutes. Where are my Pants?"

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

http://www.raybradbury.com/

There is a website....

Wonder if his publisher told him.?

[Nervous Tick]

>> By this logic, books then, are simply paper.

Yeah! But what the heck, if we’re gonna get all reactionary about it, let’s go all the way back to papyrus scrolls. Or stone tablets! That’s the ticket! Just think how *fit* we would all be if we carried all our documents on stone tablets instead of PDAs!

[Kirkwood]

FR is distracting, but not meaningless.

[JRandomFreeper]

Let me be a little more serious and philosophical about this.... RAH said that the man of the future would be a librarian, that picked up the scattered knowledge of humanity and organized it. Good call.

Ass-i-mov had the great library in space with special people that could discern movements in masses of people.

And Bradbury, with his unreadable Carbuncles of Mars, hates the internet.

I submit that RAH was at least as forwardthinking as Ass-i-mov. And both were more forwardthinking than Bradbury.

Just honest opinions.

Flame suit isn't on. I'm going to close the laptop and go to bed and see, tomorrow, what my opinion has wrought.

/johnny

[LibFreeOrDie]

"it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere."

Geez, did he say the same thing about radio?

The Internet is the biggest library ever.

[Kirkwood]

“Bradbury is right.”

So what are you doing here?

[SeeSharp]

...the survivors of the elite group of twentieth century science fiction authors has dwindled ...One of the last surviving greats is Ray Bradbury, currently 88.

What is he talking about? Evidently the author has never heard of Nivin, Pournelle, Weber, Drake, Sierling, Flint, and many others. There are plenty of Sci-Fi authors around who are just as great as Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury.

The literati gushed over Bradbury because he wrote about book burning. But frankly as science fiction Fahrenheit 451 was mediocre. It was good, but it wouldn't be on my list of greats.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Various short video clips :

[ottbmare]

My ex was building his own computers in the mid-1970s and was online (with an intranet, and later with DARPANET) in 1978. I must have been one of the first recipients of emailed love-notes in 1978. He kept trying to get me interested and bought me my first PC in 1981. Kept emailing me from work in 1985 and telling me what errands I should run for him. This somewhat diminished my enthusiasm for the internet.

I do clearly remember him telling me, ca. 1986, that this was the future and soon the whole world would be connected.

[Blado]

Bars is Heaven

[JRandomFreeper]

Winsock did not require the sacrifice of a goat. A chicken or marketing droid would work fine.

I spent a lot of time on the net with 3.1, to download the first slackware distro.... at 14.4k

/johnny

[Richard Kimball]

Philip Dick was may favorite SF writer. Never got in Bradbury much.

[cynwoody]

Perhaps he should spend some time on Mars.

The internet would really suck on Mars, given the ping time is 31.78 minutes according to Wolfram. It would be necessary for Google to set up a mirror server on planet, in which all content, including especially the cache, would be replicated using a super high speed pipe and special protocols designed to minimize turn-arounds.

Seriously, the internet is the biggest thing to happen to media since Gutenberg.

Bradbury is a tired old man. I hope to become an old man, just no where near as tired, please God!

[john in springfield]

Bradbury, like the covers of his first-edition books, is cracked with age.

[Nervous Tick]

>> My ex &etc

How could you dump a cool nerd like that??!? Shame on you.

[cynwoody]

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).

My recollection is you needed to download something from down under, Trumpet Winsock or something like that.

[Oztrich Boy]

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.

That wouldn't Bradbury, was never a hard SF writer. Or even a painter of "a more different than you imagine" future (that would be Cordwainer Smith).

[Artemis Webb]

First of all I have always loved Ray Bradbury. But he is NOT a science fiction writer. His writing is no more sci fi than an episode of Space Ghost.