Great, long interview with Neil Gaiman, about comics, movies, privacy, young adult fiction, and other such esoterica.
So it seems that a lot of your concerns in terms of privacy are very much motivated by trying to get young people to take these things seriously.
A lot of this is trying to give them information. There is that point where, you know, there are some of those strange conversations that I’ve had over the years that still echo. Sitting there with my son who was 14 or 15, having spotted an inappropriate Google search from him. Probably back in the days almost before Google, where he now works. “Hi, Mike!” And sort of saying to him, “You know, the truth is if you head over into the basement, there are boxes and boxes over in that corner of soft-core men’s magazines that I used to have film reviews and things in the eighties which you are welcome to go and peruse at your leisure.”
Just read them for the articles?
[Laughs.] My attitude on it was you are not going to find any images in there that you will wish you had never seen. If you go looking on the web, you may well find yourself with things that you really wish were not in your head. And things that have been seen can never be unseen, or not entirely.
keristor
“Death seems amazingly hard to kill.”
That is so a Neil Gaiman comment…