A boring old fart protests

Syrian authorities demand the facebook and gmail passwords of arrested protesters. Twitter is the backbone of revolutions.  White-hat hackers work on firewall busters to support Iranian demonstrations. The internet is a force for freedom.

Well yes, but...

We have electricity, water, internet... it's just another utility. And, just as our electricity is run by French and German companies, the big net services are served from the US.

There are plenty of email services, but every pensioner directed towards internet literacy is presented with a hotmail or gmail address. Facebook and Google may have achieved an unassailable critical mass in their fields. We talk of hoovering, and now we talk of googling.  And all of these are American companies.

So what?

Google and Facebook make billions from selling information about us without our informed consent, but even that's not the problem.

Does the world need more than one Facebook, one Google, one Ebay, one Amazon, one Twitter, one Blogger? Does the world need more than one GPS? Is the world outside China going to be run on Californian servers?

I use these services. I like them (mostly - watch it Zuckerberg). I am not anti-American. I am anti-oligopoly. It may be too late to think of an alternative but, if it is, "too late" suggests a power we have relinquished without thinking enough.

I fear I have offended someone tonight

Every Tuesday evening a dozen or so of us gather to discuss literature, our own literature. Plays, poems and stories we have written and which we would really like to see gaining a wider audience. It's a writers' group, a workshop ( http://manchester-writers.org.uk/ ) and it seems to improve our writing even if most of us remain unpublished.

In recent weeks we've tried a new technique. Rather than reading your own stuff and then looking up expectantly for helpful comments, you ask somebody else. You can select a reader or accept the next random volunteer, and you have to listen to your own deathless (or lifeless) prose while you watch the faces of your audience.

Another kind of artificiality you might say, but I've learned a lot. Think about the way you read a book.

The first time you see a page is almost always the last time you see it. You make just one attempt to read it, and if the intended meaning doesn't come through that one time, it's the last chance the writer has. And I've seen evidence here and elsewhere that some people don't get much out of reading - looking ahead, interpreting the syntax and punctuation as you go, are all unused skills.

The offence I may have caused came when I said that I could have read my chapter better than the person who took that responsibility. I know what it's supposed to say, how it's supposed to be read.  I could perform it on stage or on radio.

But if all that isn't actually on the page, then either I'm not doing my job properly as a writer or I have unrealistic expectations of my readers. I can't judge how much of each is true, but it makes me think.