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Mark - Breakfast EP …

We were still shooting the breeze in the office yesterday about Glen’s piece in this column on Monday.

He mentioned the discussion in news organisations here in Australia and around the world about their rules on staff participating in online activities such as blogs, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

It all came to a head after a Courier Mail staffer was sacked for criticising his own paper on his personal Facebook page.

“MySpace”, I quipped, “That’s sooooooooooooooooo 2007!”

We asked Cam Green - one of Breakfast’s Gen Y’ers — what everyone under 30 is currently using to communicate.

(I’ve just mastered the mobile phone)

Cam assured us Facebook was still a favoured option, although his friends were using Twitter more and more; he also made the point that he wasn’t using Facebook as much personally now, as he had in the past.

Glen added that, no matter whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, Flickr or Twitter, all this putting your life on-line stuff is here to stay.

Is he right?

Probably.

My own track record in predicting the future is woeful.

Our national co-ordinator, Pip - who I’ve worked on-and-off with for more than 20 years - no doubt remembers my famous 1994 pronouncement “This email stuff will never catch on.”

Actually, whenever it comes to predicting the future, I’m always reminded of a text-book called “Using Better English” which was on the syllabus in my second year of high school.

It was actually written in the early 60’s, but its advice on conjugating verbs and the difference between nouns and gerunds was so good, that it was still being reprinted 17 or 18 years later.

Each chapter started with a short story. You’d then have to do various comprehension exercises based on the story.

One day in 1980 the class got told to open up this book and turn to Chapter Ten.

We all burst out laughing.

The chapter was entitled “Home life in 1980″.

Written in the early 60’s, it was the unnamed author speculating about what life might be like 20 years hence.

Husband drives to work in hover-car…..wife takes a sonic shower….while the automatic lawn-mower purrs away quietly outside cutting the lawn by itself.

Elsewhere in the house a robot in the kitchen is starting to get dinner ready, while another vacuums.

You get the idea: Jetsons plus.

When you DO go back in time, it’s rather funny where you find clues to the momentous things that have changed our lives — like the internet revolution.

When I was in London in the late 90’s, BBC Radio 3 got permission from The Who’s Pete Townshend to do a radio production of his long-lost music and performance piece, “Lifehouse”.

Townshend was working on the incredibly ambitious follow-up to his 1969 rock opera “Tommy” when he had a nervous breakdown.

A few songs from “Lifehouse”, including the anthemic “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Baba O’Reilly” eventually surfaced on 1971’s “Who’s Next” album.

So it was a bit of a revelation when the BBC unearthed this creation from circa 1970.

“Lifehouse” is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic future where isolated individuals are connected to the outside through a huge mainframe called “the Grid”.

The people use the Grid to connect with each other and redeem themselves from their isolation by the power of (The Who’s) music.

Sounds rather like the internet, doesn’t it?

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Marius - Politics:

Driving home on Tuesday, I was listening to Robert Dessaix reading Andre Gide.

Or it may have been Andre Gide reading Robert Dessaix.

The day was sunny and warm, the air alive with the promise of spring, the jacarandas in bloom and the words coming from the radio so lilting and mellifluous, I was flat out knowing if I was listening to English or French.

The readings from Gide’s journals told of meetings with people like Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau and conversations with Marcel Proust - puffy, bedridden, talking, in fact boasting, of his homosexuality and saying he’s sure Baudelaire is gay.

(One Baudelaire quote: “God made the world from nothing, but sometimes the nothingness shows through.”)

It was just the drifty sort of counterpoint to the neon-lit ‘Now!’ of daily journalism that you need as you head away from the office. And then I was brought back to earth by this neat summary of our craft, courtesy of Gide via Dessaix: “Journalism is everything that will interest less tomorrow than it does today.”

A good reason to read a bit of Gide as well as the papers. But I’ll stop short of Proust.

I’ve always found a page or two of Marcel has a powerful narcotic effect.