u r dumb, I can haz Nobel

[piccolomondo]

Nobel Laureate Misses the Point

Doris Lessing, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has used her acceptance speech last week to blame cultural decline on "blogging and blugging" and to say the Internet make us dumb:

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 speciality or other, for instance, computers.

... 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.

One could respond to this in many ways, but perhaps the most fruitful would be to simply accept Lessing's premise. TV and computers and the Internet have changed the ways that people spend their time, and those changes have not always been critically examined...

And yet, perhaps book lovers will need to accept that the "great tradition" of literary art is moving into a new medium. It's not the first time. Print did the same thing to an oral culture, and recorded pop music has largely replaced poetry for most in the modern world. But television, films, and web sites can all offer powerful stories. And print, far from dying out, is being consumed in massive quantities online. The issue, as it has always been, is pointing readers and viewers to the sort of material worth their time and attention, material that tells true stories about the world or enlarges our sense of what it means to be human or offers real entertainment. What needs to be avoided is the content, online and off, that is little more than pabulum spoonfed to those who want fare just rich enough to keep them from boredom.

Aside from the internet comments, Lessing's speech is a great and inspiring read.

[piccolomondo]

Blogging and Blugging

Doris Lessing will never be confused with the Internet's exhibitionist personality Tila Tequila, but winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in October helped Ms. Lessing's status on MySpace. What once was 125 friends before the announcement from the Nobel committee has now topped 350 friends.

Ms. Hanford, the woman who has been Ms. Lessing's bridge to the Internet, declined to comment on Ms. Lessing's speech.

But some literary-minded bloggers seemed a little piqued...
... Carolyn Kellogg, an M.F.A. student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, writing at Pinky's Paperhaus, gave her post the headline, "Blog and Put a Dagger in Doris Lessing's Heart." "Although I am sure Doris Lessing isn't reading this blug," she wrote, "I hope that someone points her to One Laptop Per Child."

[read article]