An open e-mail to Janet Street-Porter from Digby Ponder and three other s

virgin on the net

An open e-mail to Janet Street-Porter from Digby Ponder and three others.

Wednesday 20 March, 20.20.12

Dear Janet. We haven't met, but my mother was once in the audience for Ready Steady Go, which either you or Cathy McGowan presented. She can't remember which, but whoever it was trod on her toe as she was dancing to a Kinks number.

You may even remember her - she was wearing a scarlet PVC mini-skirt and cross-your-heart bra - coincidentally the same as you! She is amazed at how good you look, given your age - and says how remarkable it is that you should still be so au fait with the youth scene.

But we at Flames cybercafe, here in Crouch End, London, wonder how in touch you really are after your vitriolic attack on the Internet and those who surf it, in your Channel 4 programme this week. Specifically, I wish to challenge you on a number of your charges:

You say that the Net is "a morass of rubbish", which it takes a lifetime to find anything useful in.

Not true, Janet. Well, not totally true. First, it depends on what you mean by "useful". If you know what you want to find and how to search for it, it is spectacularly helpful. For instance, I am engaged in writing a novel of the old West (provisionally titled Wild Man, Wild Horses) and have used the Net to discover what kinds of guns my hero would have been familiar with, how big the ponies that pulled stage-coaches were and what Apaches would have eaten in the evenings. Is this useless?

You say "political debate exists on a level that would disgrace the average saloon bar".

It wouldn't. I often go to pubs for recreation and - after a couple of pints - go home and surf. As far as I can see, there is nearly no difference at all between the relative levels of political sophistication - although it is true that the Ku Klux Klan don't often turn up at the Robe and Rabbit. But I think that's an American thing.

You assert that "sex is transformed into a series of impersonal fantasies".

This is most certainly untrue. The sex fantasies available on the Net are extremely personal. Zip, who is 13, says it has been very helpful in answering his questions about sex, and Don teamed up with his current girlfriend through a Net romance. Only yesterday, he spoke to her for the first time by telephone to her home in Helsinki, and expects a flesh contact sometime in the summer. Is that impersonal?

You say that at least with "real sex" you can share a cigarette and a drink afterwards with your partner. Yes, but with virtual sex, you do not have to wash first, worry about breaking wind, wake up next to them in the morning and think up strategies for not returning their phonecalls, or pine when they do not return yours.

Oh, and if you think that's somehow socially sad, perhaps (says Don) you could invite him to one of your glittering parties, where he would be able to meet a wider range of babes.

You say it is full of "identikit computer nerds downloading fuzzy pictures of Pamela Anderson and typing earnest diatribes on continuity errors in the `X-Files' ".

This is purely insulting. One, there is no physical or mental similarity whatsoever between (for instance) the four of us sitting here at this terminal in Crouch End. Only Zip could be described as a nerd - and most boys are at 13 - and I don't think you could describe a marketing executive- cum-novelist, a florist and a cycle courier as "Identikit".

Two, none of us download Pamela Anderson - but if we did, the image would not be fuzzy. And as for the X-Files, you are talking about one of the most successful programmes ever screened for a youth audience. And who knows all about that?

Perhaps what is really getting up your hooter is the fact that what we can all get out of the Net what we choose, not what you (in your wisdom) choose for us.

You say it turns once-interesting adults into gibbering adolescent bores.

That trick seems to be have been managed long before the Internet came along. Have you ever stopped at the shelves of a newsagent's and looked at the magazines on wind-surfing, train-spotting, stamp-collecting, television personalities, do-it-yourself, fishing for chub, What Land-Rover? and so many more? Who did you imagine read those things and talked about them? Us, that's who. The people who have always been "gibbering adolescent bores". The people who you have spent a lifetime making programmes for. The proles.

Sig Dig, Len, Don and Zip, c/oNolan@Flames,Crouch End.