To me, the issue runs deeper than "you have to understand the Internet to make laws about it". Being computer illiterate in today's world means that you are not responsible for managing your own correspondence, and do not do any of your own research. Also, it means that your work for at least the last fifteen years has consisted entirely of either manual labour at someone else's behest, or of telling people what to do.
You can only get away with it if you have teams of people to do stuff for you: prepare your documents, write your letters, do your research, deliver news to your desk and filter your interaction with the outside world, and if you do not get your hands dirty by joining in with that work. Which is fine if (a) you can afford it, and (b) you're happy being infantilized to that degree.
Personally, being computer illiterate in a world of ubiquitous computing would drive me absolutely mental.
The censored comments may indeed have been 'extraordinarily offensive', but with the disemvowelling in place it would take a lot of effort to reconstruct them and make that judgement for myself. What is left is the impression that all comments criticising Cory were censored, and those defending him were left un-touched.
Sometimes it's as important to maintain the appearance of fairness as it is to be fair, especially when people are already looking for something to be annoyed about.
In light of Doctorow's oft-expressed belief that the answer to bad speech is not censorship but more speech, perhaps this could have been avoided by leaving both the complaint and Cory's response untouched, then refusing to approve anything further on the topic from either side.
Of course, everything looks clearer with the benefit of hindsight.
I liked it. It was entertaining, and it tied up the series nicely. Nothing was particularly surprising, plot-wise and there was far too much "tell rather than show", especially at the end, but that's a par for the course.
I don't really see any problems with only middle-tier characters dying in this one. A major character dying at the end would have out-heroed Harry (again), and after Dumbledore and Sirius bought it in the last two books it would have looked like quota-filling anyway.
I was a bit surprised at how the relationships were played. Having paired the characters up in book six, Rowling seemed not to want to do anything with them but have the couples snog occasionally to remind us they were together. Nothing interesting was done with them, even when you had two seventeen year-old best friends shacked up together for long periods of time in a tent with nobody but each other for company. (I guess there wasn't really room for any _more_ teen angst in the series, but it did make the relationships seem flat and obligatory)
For US readers: pretty much every soap opera and TV serial in the UK, when they want to get rid of a character but hold open the possibility of their return, will have that character "move to Australia". (In Australian soaps, the character will move to Perth)
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| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 3 |
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