Normally when you hear Nobel Prize winning authors talking about the internet, it's to decry it for dumbing us all down. Spare a thought, then, for Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio, who accepted his Nobel Prize in Sweden with a far more optimistic outlook:

"Who knows, if the internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he's reported as saying.

Well, optimistic if you believe that the pinnacle of the internet's tremendous power comes down to the ability to spread ridicule far and wide. In that strange world, we all strive to be like the 4Chan users who spend their days photoshopping Hitler's head into ridiculous, uncomfortable places. OK... perhaps it's not that strange a world.