The TCU Bookstore is a rich source of information. But, how many of us actually take advantage of it? Let’s imagine for a moment how many books we would be able to read if we were to stop browsing Facebook and Myspace on a daily basis.
The writer Doris Lessing was recently awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. In response to this, she wrote an acceptance speech that quickly caused controversy. The text can be found here .
In it, Lessing adopts a nostalgic and pessimistic position towards the new digital era, ruled mainly by the Internet and TV. She sharply criticizes the Internet for seducing “a whole generation with 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”.
Lessing sets up her argument by alluding to her visit to Zimbabwe and elaborately describing how “everyone, begged for books.” She then goes on to admire their “hunger for books” despite the fact that most of them have not even been properly fed. It is obvious that Lessing yearns to go back to the Golden Age of print; to an era where everybody who could read just couldn’t get enough of knowledge. For her, literature constitutes education.
Nevertheless, she contrasts Zimbabwe’s population with British boys who have been exposed to Internet and are an active part of today’s media culture. According to Lessing, “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 specialty or other, for instance, computers.” Thus, she criticizes how people with a wide access to information are those who access it the least, hence not educating themselves as thoroughly as they could.
It is obvious that Lessing views the Internet as a cause of change. She takes a deterministic standpoint by claiming that “what has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution.” A revolution that she views with disgrace, since it has caused the rapid decline of desire for knowledge. She places books and education/knowledge in a parallel, calling upon several examples of famed writers who have reached their zenith because they were exposed to books since they were young. “In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.”
Her speech received a variety of opposing and similar responses.
John Connell argues that the world is not fragmented, but rather diverse. Unlike her, he conceives the shift that Lessing dislikes as part of a more complex change: “If any certainties once perceived as positive are now no longer such, is that necessarily because our modern condition is somehow less healthy or is it simply a reflection of major shifts in social, political and economic realities, and therefore consequentially of changing priorities and of shifting values?” Thus, he would agree with the theory that culture determines technology, and not the other way around, like Lessing. Finally, Connell believes that it is quixotic to try to remove today’s generation from technology only “to be replaced by some misty golden age when schoolchildren – eager scholars all – devoured yet another classic text before breakfast each morning.” Similarly, Duncan Riley from TechCrunch argues that the Internet has made education available to many people.
On the other hand, Alan replies to a post by arguing in favor of Lessing. He too takes a deterministic viewpoint and notes that “contemporary electronic media has left a generation of children with atrophied imaginative powers.” He makes an example by saying that his daughter, who attends a good public school, “rarely picks up a book out of [her] own free will and [her] knowledge of literature and geography is shockingly inadequate.” Hence, media has inflicted damage onto today’s generations.
So, which side of the spectrum holds more truth?
Doris Lessing
