The Scotsman 30 January 2024

Playwright Clare Duffy set up her company Civic Digits to consider what it means to live in a world dominated by the internet. With a commitment to equality, she wanted to ensure nobody got left behind in the rush for social-media likes. She also wanted everybody, girls in particular, to flourish in this technological landscape.

And this landscape is not always pretty. Divisive opinions, once held only by crackpots, can wheedle their way into the mainstream through the weight of online numbers. Young people, those digital natives who have never known life without computers, must forge their own moral path in an attempt to distinguish the reasonable viewpoint from the voice of a zealot.

Take incels. These self-styled “involuntary celibates” – straight men who cannot find a girlfriend – would formerly have been considered unlucky in love and nothing more sinister than that. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).