There’s a wonderful interview of Tom Wolfe in The American Spectator (sorry, the interview’s not on their website, you have to buy the January 2005 dead tree edition), in which he says, inter alia, that the Internet somehow replaced knitting.
The Internet is the modern form of knitting. In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it — a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread. That’s mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time.
He also observed that scrolling is not exactly cutting-edge technology:
It is primitive in the sense that the Internet is a scrolling medium. A printed book with pages was such an advance over scrolling. To go back to scrolls is to step into the past. That goes back to monks in the 13th century. A lot has happened since the 13th century to improve the technology of reading, and so far no one has come up, for sheer reading ease, with anything better than hard copy pages.
This five-page interview contains insights into the Internet, the mainstream media, Rathergate, and some predictions: Darwinism will die soon, says Wolfe, and so will the novel.
(It also contains a typesetting error. Note to TAS editors: most folks don’t ring their hands when worried; they wring them. In the future, please e-mail all copy to me before publication, and I’ll proofread it for free.)