Lessing loves the old ones
Posted: December 12th, 2007, by Peter BrantleyIn an essay at Ars Technica, “Nobel winner blames cultural decline on ‘blogging and blugging’” Nate Anderson discusses the near-loathing that the esteemed SciFiction writer Doris Lessing pours out on Internet communications, generally speaking.
Lessing is quote as saying:
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.
Nate Anderson responds with more sensitivity for evolving patterns of information creation, distribution, and consumption:
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. …
Lessing tells an anecdote about a visit to a posh London school. She goes to the library. She is told, “You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.” If true, it does seem a sad story, but the answer simply cannot be a fetishization of books. We need instead to encourage the consumption (and thoughtful digestion) of artful fiction and nonfiction on whatever page or screen it appears.
Yep. We need to get over the concept that the book offers a primality unmatched.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I think Anderson subtly misses the point of Lessing’s speech here. She clearly thinks that the habit of reading (and reading long-form text — books — not letters or blog posts or Wiki pages) shapes the mind in ways which are important to thinking and communicating clearly. Just a few years ago no one would have thought this controversial.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:34 am
The key point here is Anderson’s comment “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.…” The problem is just that–Internet searching lends itself spendidly to such pablum, especially to unsophisticated audiences, in ways that long-form media like books does not (not, of course, to “fetishize” books). Locating information on the Internet is easy, but validating the information’s validity is near-impossible.