Website review: Net dumbs us down: Nobel prize winn...
KahlilaGibran discovered this in Internet
•1 reviews since Dec 10, 2007
internet, writers
•smh.com.au/news/web/net-dumbs-us-down-nobel-p...
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judefa rated 8 months ago
Writer Doris Lessing used her Nobel Prize acceptance
speech to rail against the internet.
It has "seduced a whole generation into its inanities", she
said, and created a world "where people know nothing".
From the page:
"We are in a fragmenting culture, where our
certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned
and where it is common for young men and women,
who have had years of education, to know nothing
of the world, to have read nothing, knowing
only some speciality or other, for instance,
computers," she said in the speech read out
by Lessing's British publisher as she was
too ill to travel to Sweden for the Nobel festivities.
Now, to be honest I am not a reader of Lessing, in spite
of having had her books thrust on me in the 70s.
And a cantankerous 88-year-old author has every
reason to regard the net as the enemy.
Speaking personally, as someone a generation or
two younger than her, new media has changed
me from a bookaholic to a split personality.
I spent much of my income on books up until a
few years ago and try to remain loyal to them despite the
new zeitgeist but the fact is my book reading has
been largely wrecked by the computer and the ease
of exploring the world that way.
I have become too good at using the net, in fact,
and books can feel "slow" as result.
But I am happiest when I combine the two
-- eg, use books I am reading or have
loved as the jumping-off point
for rambles on the net.
And still a lot of those books I love will
find better use in shrines to the past.
After all, we are living through a transition period
at least as far-reaching as the invention of the
printing press, and our thinking
is bound to change drastically.
Much of the net IS inane, yet I regard my nephews and
nieces and their friends, who all grew up with computers, as
pretty cluey for all their lack of book reading.
~~~
And here's a question I have wondered about: If
you watch quality cinema are you learning
less than if you read novels?
Obviously you will be less word-literate, but mightn't
you be a better judge of character?
Because while movies miss the detail and subtlety
of books they do teach vividly and effectively
about archetypes and observation of people.
