Lessing disses the “inanities” of the Internet

In the old days we asked the village sage, or turned to a weighty reference book to learn something we wanted to know. Now we use the Internet for everything: to look up directions, read news, and to diagnose ourselves with far-fetched diseases. Afternoons can be whiled away meandering through its delightful passages.

Doris Lessing, the stern 88-year-old novelist, does not approve of this practice. Last week she used her Nobel Prize acceptance speech to diss the Internet and, by implication, Google, an innocent search engine that wants nothing more than to be a friend to all humanity. She said we lived in a “fragmenting culture” where it was “common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.”

The Internet had “seduced a whole generation with its inanities,” she claimed. Even reasonable people had become addicted to it, and before they know it, often find “a whole day has passed in blogging, etc.” This time would be better spent reading books. Lessing ended by predicting the death of literature, because a culture that doesn’t value reading cannot produce great writers. Read more of this opinion piece by Jacqueline Maley in The Sydney Morning Herald online.