Nobel winner Doris Lessing's acceptance speech was all about kids not reading books and the decline of western civilization as we know it. The culprit? Gossip Girl, blogs, lolcats, and social networking sites such as My Space:
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 about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers.What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.
While I respect the quaint and dainty sensibilities of previous generations, I can't say I agree. The internet has opened up the world to a whole new generation of young people; we are now connected in a way we have never been before, with access to information that 20 years ago was well beyond our reach. We are able to collaborate globally and locally, and innovate in the formulation of ideas and projects in ways that have been, up to this point, unheard of. If anything, this proliferation of communication has fostered a newfound love for the written word, whether the word comes from books or a webpage (um, Harry Potter, anyone?). I, for one, would have not known about Doris Lessing had it not been for my trusted RSS reader, Wikipedia and google.
Besides, the internet is responsible for Gossip Girl (books and blogging), The upcoming Quarterlife (video blogging and MySpace! from the creators of My So Called Life!) and last week's episode of Scrubs. Nancy Drew, Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice have got nothin' on that.
And, by the way, what's blugging and where do I sign up? (Is it compatible with Vista?)
