Miranda Devine, Susan Greenfield, that movie, and why the intertubes is ruining western civilisation ...

For those who came in late, the story so far ...

Susan Greenfield is angry. She strides into the canteen at the department of pharmacology at the University of Oxford in lace-up boots and a miniskirt, flicking her blonde ponytail and glaring through her magnificent false eyelashes. She looks more like a cartoon heroine battling baddies than the 59-year-old former director of the Royal Institution (RI), the world’s oldest scientific research establishment. (Susan Greenfield: I am not some greedy harridan, back in the day when The Times was outside the paywall).

Now that's how to start a story on a scientist!

The full perils of Penelope Pitstop routine, with the Royal Institution as the Hooded Claw. Back in April when the story ran, the Baroness - that sounds so splendidly British - was battling her redundancy and eviction from the directorship of the RI, helped along by a building project going over budget by a couple of million pounds. Loose change, really, when you consider her vital insights:

She doesn’t think computer games are life-threatening, like smoking, but she says that they are as much of a risk to mankind as climate change. “What a waste if we are just going whack-whack on a computer game. Someone said to me, ‘I’m addicted to computer games, what should I do?’ I said ‘Why don’t you just go for a walk and feel the Sun on your face, have a love affair, get out there in three dimensions.”

The neuroscientist doesn’t play computer games. “It’s not just that they could be limiting children’s attention spans. These games teach a very dangerous lesson — that actions have no consequences because you die, stand up and play the game again. If you don’t have a continuity of past, present and future because you are just endlessly trapped in the moment do you even have an identity? Are we going to see people in the long run going through some existential crisis?”

Remind you of anyone?

Well if you were mad enough to splash out the cash for today's Sunday Telegraph, it might remind you of Miranda the Devine, now firmly set like a diamond in her new tabloid home, and ready to talk the computer talk, though strangely without once mentioning her one time Baroness heroine in The triumph of the nerds:

Who knows yet what will be the impact of this new impersonal intimacy on the human brain's neuronal network, evolved to process millions of bits of social information conveyed through face-to-face communication, most of it non-verbal? We are in the middle of the revolution, borne along by the anarchic brilliance of its architects.

Yep, it's back to the future, and the Devine upset, agitated and unnerved by the strange new world of Call of Duty, online multiplayer games, and the anonymous players from all over the world - ominous to old people, awe-insipring and in equal parts thrilling and thoroughly spooky.

Back to Greenfield:

She (Greenfield) is concerned that those who live only in the present, online, don’t allow their malleable brains to develop properly. “It’s not going to destroy the planet but is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the society we want?”

Well the world moves on, as it inevitably does, such are the days of our lives, and with Greenfield in her own real world wars, the Devine has found a new harbinger of doom, the movie The Social Network, and she loves it because it allows her to slag off nerds for the way that they've ruined, are ruining, or will ruin the world:

The central theme of the movie is that computer nerds have rewritten the rules of human engagement to compensate for their social disability, and to handicap the likeable people they envy. But they have made the new game so alluring that even people with genius EQ use it; Facebook this year grew to 500 million users.

Yep, it's a chance to celebrate Aaron Sorkin's skewering of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg - the latest in a very long queue - and for Devine to reflect on Zuckerberg and the way that nerds and girls relate:

There is no filter between his brain and his tongue, which is the way people behave online, severed from the inhibitions that come from talking to a real person.

It's much harder to be cruel to a flesh and blood mortal than avatar to avatar.

At the end of the scene, Erica delivers the zinger: "You probably are going to be a very successful computer person. But you are going to go through the rest of your life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know [it's] because you're an a******."

It was at this point that I entered a deep philosophical and existential crisis. You see, Zuckerberg is an actual human being - or so I'm told by those who've met him - yet here is a scribbler for a newspaper blathering on the dangerous full to overflowing intertubes about a fictionalised portrait in a movie - either digitised images or shards of light in silver halide crystals - about a human being she makes no claims to having met, and making judgements about this human being, in a way that is much crueller than the average netizen would deliver avatar to avatar.

She is in fact being cruel to a flesh and blood mortal, and in the process showing that there's no filter between her brain and her keyboard, which is the way journalists behave in opinion pieces, severed as they are from the inhibitions that might come from talking to a real person before they went off to slander them in bits and bytes.

You can see how this works, because of course back in the day, in the long lost twentieth century, it was alleged that movies and television seriously warped the human brain, by removing it from reality and turning viewers into fiends.

Hang on, did I say twentieth century? I'm indebted to Dr. Ken Matto in The Dangers of Television for explaining how right now in your home you might be harbouring a satantic drug addictive device which can produce a "teleholic".

So quaint, Dr. Ken being stuck with TV causing loneliness, depression, physical disease, a fantasy lifestyle, acceptance of sinful principles, and ultimately of course suicide. He doesn't seem to understand that these days it's video games and the intertubes that does all the damage, and turns people away from being solid Christian nerds to appalling social network nerds. Cue the Devine:

In effect it (Facebook) has made us blind to the qualities that make a person charismatic. They don't count. Facebook is what happens after the nerds have triumphed. They invented it in anger after finding out that even though they ruled the world they still weren't getting the girls. Zuckerman towards the end denies he hates the handsome, charming, Winklevoss twins, the "Winklevi", his wealthy fellow Harvard students who are suing him for appropriating their idea.

"They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them," he says, revealing jealousy as his driving emotion. In the final scenes, Sorkin places Zuckerman alone in an office with his laptop, leaving the audience with little doubt about the consequence of his social deficits. This humanist moral has enraged Facebookers who claim Sorkin has disrespected and misunderstood their internet communities.

Uh huh. But what are the consequences of his social deficits? What has turned the conservative Catholic Devine to a sudden embrace of humanist morals? How does Zuckerberg show his lack of empathy and lack of social skills? What has caused him to become a cold, unlovable Aspergers type? What makes him an explicit personification of the way the intertubes is ruining the world?

It is an odd fact that the man who has defined the social media revolution is strangely removed from it. He calls himself a "curmudgeon" when it comes to the technology. He carries a mobile phone but can't remember the number. He was on Facebook while writing the script but quit because of a "sort-of stalker". He's not on twitter. He says socialising on the internet is to socialising what reality television is to reality.

Eek. He's actually Susan Greenfield. In some bizarre mutating TG experiment, some strange science that could only happen in this day and age, if it wasn't for Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus back in 1818, we'd have here a classic futurist example of science gone mad.

You see, in much the same way as the Devine has managed to be cruel to a movie avatar, thinking she's talking about flesh and blood, she's also been cruel to a person who shows off the very same personal attitudes and stances she relishes. Being curmudgeonly about current technology, and how it's the ruination of the western world.

Now here's a test. Given that all three are on record as disliking certain aspects of contemporary technology, did Miranda the Devine, Mark Zuckerberg or Susan Greenfield make these comments?

Networking sites are just as sinister, ... says. “Eye contact, body language, shaking someone’s hand, cuddling them are all vital to human interaction and they’re not there when you communicate with your 900 friends on Facebook.” Search engines also worry .... “There’s a difference between information and knowledge. The Government produced a report saying three-year-olds must learn to google. I find that strange — what should they google? We should be training the young to ask questions, not to use a search engine.” Twitter just reminds ... of a small child. “I’m putting on one sock, now I’m putting on another sock — I don’t have time for it, I have ten friends, they take up my time.”

Okay, okay, it was Greenfield. Zuckerberg's not that silly, and the Devine tweets, like the twitterer she is. If only she tweeted about socks, the tweetosphere would suddenly sound Shakespearean (put these Devine tweets in your pipe and smoke on them for an example of the thought processes of a small child).

So who wrote this?

From the happy confidence of the 1950s and 60s TV ads, we have been plunged into brain-scrambling mobile phones, brain-gnawing prion diseases, contaminated foodstuffs, not to mention the underlying stealth of chemical and cyber-terrorism, let alone designer children, artificial wombs and human clones. Small wonder there is a simple knee-jerk to veto all this confusion and scary technology in one go.

Okay, okay, it was Greenfield again, and you can find it here as part of her clarion call for A new kind of literacy.

And of course if you've come late to the story, you can also seek out Ben Goldacre's Speculation, hypothesis and ideas. But where's the evidence?

Let us be clear. It is possible that much of the Baroness's output on this topic is speculative flim flam, dressed up in a science-y "gloss". And perhaps it is dangerous and unhelpful for one of our most prominent science communicators to appear repeatedly in the media making wild headline-grabbing claims about the dangers of computers, with minimal evidence. Is Greenfield unhelpfully misrepresenting what it is that scientists do, and indeed the whole notion of what it means to have empirical evidence for a clearly stated claim, thus undermining the public's understanding of science?

I don't know. I am merely raising it as a hypothesis. We need to examine these questions in more detail. I am very, very happy to do so.

Indeed, and so he did, and so the Goldacre Greenfield wars began (and you can google them, but we warn you, googling may cause blindness or hair on palms).

Meanwhile, it's pleasing to note that these days schools invite children to participate in the art of 'reading' a movie, which is to say to understand how a drama uses tricks and devices to sell itself to a viewer. If only the Devine hadn't been too old to attend a course.

Who said this?

Let's get to this issue of fact versus fiction, because I have to believe Facebook and their PR team are every bit as good as our PR team, and I don't want to be at war with Mark or Facebook, so let's be really clear: There were two lawsuits brought against Facebook at roughly the same time, the defendant, plaintiffs and witnesses all came into the deposition room, they swore an oath, and what came out of it were three very different versions of the same story that often directly contradicted each other, where in order for one thing to be true, somebody else would have to be lying. And instead of picking one and deciding, "I think that's the truth, that's the story I'm going to tell," or picking one and saying, "I think that's the juiciest," I decided to tell them all and embrace the idea that there's a Rashomon quality to this, that nobody is telling the same story. Throughout the movie, we're telling the audience that the narrators here are unreliable. And any time you go to see a movie with the words, "The following is a true story," I would look at the movie the way you'd look at a painting, and not a photograph.

Oh okay, it was Aaron Sorkin, writer of the movie that the Devine has wilfully mis-read. Rashomon? Isn't that the rash you get when you apply too much curry sawa soap to your brain?

Of course in her usual infinitely tabloid stereotypical anti-nerd way, Miranda the Devine has looked at a painting, and thought she saw a photograph - perhaps she also mistakes her partner for a hat on occasion.

That was Sorkin in Rolling Stone here, and let's round it out with one last quote from him:

SORKIN: .... A woman wrote a very positive review of the movie that ended by saying, "This movie made me want to egg Mark Zuckerberg's house and then help him clean up," and I thought that was perfect ... You can't write a bad guy — I guess you can, but it's not very interesting. I never saw Mark as a bad guy, I saw him as an extremely complicated guy. It isn't until the last scene of the movie that Mark says the line, "I'm not a bad guy." That's the only time that a moment like that happens, it's like a cymbal crash in that scene, and Rashida [Jones]'s character, simply by saying, "I know," gives the audience permission to say, "Thank you, that's how we've been feeling too, and we've been waiting for somebody to validate this feeling that he's not a bad guy." He's been attacked for two hours in this thing, and he is a young guy, he is an awkward guy, he had way too much weight on his shoulders at way too young an age, and he made mistakes.

Uh huh. So Sorkin and the Devine do their Rashomon routine, or is that the three blind men with the elephant, or is that 'never trust the artist, always trust the tale'?

I wish I could be just as generous, just as open and willing to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking and new ways to promote a movie by getting everyone agog and twittering ...

But after reading a Miranda the Devine column, I invariably want to egg her house, and I never want to help her clean it up.

I blame the internet for making me socially dysfunctional ...

(Below: here at the pond, we recommend the following precautions when entering the force field of a Miranda the Devine column. It also helps when playing video games or using a computer or watching television or listening to the radio, or when being given an X-ray).