British author, actor, comedian, television presenter and film director Stephen Fry isn't nearly as worried as Miley Cyrus is that social media and the Internet are turning us into passive idiots.

Far from it, Fry says in this fascinating video interview (below) in which he puts such concerns in historical perspective and points out the tremendous advantages of modern communications technology. Fry, by the way, has more than 920,000 followers of his Twitter account and already has been "listed" nearly 5,000 times.

Some excerpts:

"I'm not particularly negative or pessimistic about the social qualities, the linguistic qualities, the concentration qualities of 'Generation Web', as they're called."

"We are constantly in need of connecting with people for friendship, love, sex, knowledge, growth, enmity, territoriality...all the imperatives that drive us as human beings. And we've created villages and towns to help us do that, and roads. And now we've created something that allows us to do it even more."

"Where people make their critical error and criticize all this and think it's a danger and is reducing our capacity to act as proper human beings is they think it's all this: You either sit in front of a screen of some kind, tapping away all your life, going 'LOL' and being childish, and not writing in proper English sentences, or you sit in an old-fashioned study with books, and you read properly and you engage properly and you go for walks. Well, I do both. And most people do both. It is not one or the other."

The clip below is billed as Part 1. Looking forward to more.