Web Monitor
15:23 UK time, Thursday, 10 December 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: Lording it, what made geography interesting, and the new pretenders.
•On bookmarking site , the director of Lord of the Rings and just recently the Lovely Bones, is making no bones about his view on piracy:
"It literally could lead to the death of films... They [the film industry] are only going to continue to make those movies if they make their money back."
• There's one thing we can all agree about the climate change debate: it's made geography interesting. He's calling the subject the new history:
"To the schoolchildren of the 1970s, geography seemed safe and slightly dull ... But that has changed. It is getting harder and harder in conversation to raise one or other of the most basic subjects in geography - agriculture, glaciation, rivers and population - without a flicker of panic crossing the other person's face. You are no longer talking about a neutral subject. At any moment you might be about to discuss water salinity in Bangladesh, or the acidification of the ocean, or desertification in sub-Saharan Africa. Whatever aspect of geography it is that you start with threatens to segue into a discussion on the most polarising topic there is: climate change."
• David Thomson is a serial biographer of actors but he's noticed a trend of late - there are no more method actors. In the not mourning the end of a time when actors went into therapy as a matter of course:
"But just as the Method needed script material about the search for human truth, so this new cool pretending is founded on a way of looking at the world that says you can't trust anyone, can you? It suggests that - for the moment at least - we have given up on self-knowledge and feel ourselves being massaged or directed by most of our presidents, and nearly all of our eternal performers from Johnny Carson to David Letterman."
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