David Weinberger sez, “Stephen Fry explains that when a frustrated traveler tweets something about wanting to bomb an airport where there have been delays, the traveler isn’t really announcing that he is about to bomb the airport. Social media, Fry explains, need to be understood as conversations. And then Fry kicked into the fund for the frustrated traveler’s legal fees.”
Fry really lays into the English judiciary here, and with some justification. They are notoriously aloof from the world of mortal humans. I keep hearing tales of an English judge in the 1980s had to ask a defense lawyer what a t-shirt was, and whether it was something you only wore at tea time, though I can’t locate a reference on teh googles, but the prominence of this story (myth?) in English folklore says something about the national perception of the bench.
Unfortunately, the BBC video isn’t embeddable because, well, public service, right?
Stephen Fry says British judges don’t understand Twitter
(Image: Stephen Fry @ BorderKitchen, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from raaphorst’s photostream)