On being less literal about the virtual

Camden, London, September 2008
Robin Hunt

The media’s morbid fascination with the “Second Life divorce” reveals how most media -especially newspapers, even if they also have an online presence- is still trapped in a mentality that understands “the virtual” as opposed to “the real”. (”Second Life affair leads to real life divorce,” said The Guardian). A Second Life affair is no more virtual than flirting over txt messaging, handwritten letters, telephone calls or even a club’s bar. (All flirting is virtual). The “alter-egos” of people on so-called “virtual worlds” or “environments” are still determined by those “outside” the machine. We are those alter-egos, we are the machine.

From Never Neutral. [It's down the story...]

Real World Suffers Population Losses as Privileged Elite Evolve in Subsidised Environment

Obama was an Elitist too, right?

Today, I worry that too many journalists write only for other journalists. Columnists who have never really lived in the real world let alone knocked on hundreds of doors, write columns only for their friends. Large parts of the media are increasingly populated by a privileged elite of top university graduates who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments, and are impervious to what the great majority of people are thinking, removed as they are from the commercial imperative of actually connecting with enough readers to make their papers financially viable.

Some of you here tonight, I suspect, may sneer at the kind of family-values paper I’ve just described – that almost comic obsession with the letters page. Those values, you’ll argue, belong to another era. Well, maybe. My own view is that some values are timeless.

Those "elites" again.


And for the BBC-bashing bit.


Wikipedia (via Roy Greenslade) reveals that the author of the quote was:

... educated at University College School, a private fee-paying school in Hampstead, on a state scholarship... In his school holidays, [he] worked as a messenger at the Sunday Express [his father, Peter... was a prominent journalist on the Sunday Express] and during his pre-university gap year as a trainee in the Daily Express. From 1967 he read English at Leeds University...

So no privilege there, then? Just real world.