We Shall Agree to Disagree

I'll start by congratulating Doris Lessing on winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ("Oh Christ!")... I respect Ms. Lessing immensely as both a respected author, activist, and visionary. Her novels, poems, and short stories have been read and enjoyed by millions including many happy school children in Zimbabwe!

Unfortunately, Doris Lessing has missed the train so to speak. She views the internet not as an open conduit of information, but as a black hole of vice, lethargy, and waste. Obviously, the web is chock full of mindless flash games, pornography, and gambling sites, but there are also 3,180,676 articles and counting on Wikipedia.

Notwithstanding, I love to read--that is I love to read books. Yet, I do some of my reading on a Kindle. Would Doris Lessing have a problem with this? I think probably not, but then again a Kindle is a kind of computer isn't it?

"We are in a fragmenting culture... 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." --Doris Lessing

I'm kind of nit-picking here but does Ms. Lessing really have that big of a problem with computers and the internet that she needs to voice her frustration as a major theme of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech? Unfortunately, yes. Then again, she might not realize that without the internet, no one outside of the auditorium would even hear or read her prepared speech.

Maybe I am being a little harsh towards Doris Lessing's comments. Perhaps they were simply misguided, like Senator Ted Steven's infamous likening of the internet to "a series of tubes."



I just think that Doris Lessing should spend a day or two 'reading the internet;' she might even learn something new!