The media’s obsession with “Web 2.0” continues. Facebook, Bebo and MySpace all feature prominently in news reports where they have only the most tangential relevance, hand-wringing features are written about the impact of these new internet fads on life as we know it, etc etc. This media obsession arises mostly out of their own fear and confusion, because print journalism is staring down an oncoming wave of significant change.
One side-effect of this, and of the media’s traditional belief that contriving a conflict makes for good journalism, is the periodic celebration of a voice that says the internet is destroying our souls. This turns up in different forms at different times; Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur was breathlessly reported all over the world and hardly held up to the least bit of scrutiny. (I haven’t read it, and don’t intend to, because his claims are silly on their face.)
The latest incident was yesterday, discussing Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Under the headline “The Net Dumbs Us Down”, the lede in the Sydney Morning Herald version (that turned up in NZ papers) ran:
New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing has used her acceptance speech to rail against the internet, saying it has “seduced a whole generation into its inanities” and created a world where people know nothing.
Hmm. If you take a look at the speech itself you come away with quite a different picture of what Lessing was saying. The internet gets the barest mention at the start; most of it is a celebration of libraries and a restatement of the crucial role played by books and literature. It draws pointed comparisons between the desire for books and schooling in the poorest parts of Zimbabwe, and the lack of interest in books in the most prestigious schools in the UK. (It gets some vicious digs into Mugabe along the way.)
So no, she didn’t rail against the internet. The internet was used as an example of how modern life in its entirety is filling peoples lives with matters of less worth than books.
It’s well worth a read. I’m not sure how much I agree with her. I think that there are different kinds of literacy at work on the net and with books; the net is really nothing more than a giant conversation, and it follows the social rules of a conversation, and produces content of the value and depth of a conversation. Books are emphatically not conversation, and lend themselves differently. In my cod-pomo way, I’m not going to say one form is better than the other, but they definitely have different strengths, and a decline in books would be a huge loss.
One thing I do know for sure is that we could be much better served by our media than we are being currently; and that every time a story like this turns up in our media, devoid of hyperlinks to its source material and dubious on its face, my interest in preserving the media status quo diminishes still further.
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I’ve been needing lots of sleep this week. This back injury must be taking more out of me than I think it is. Either that, or I’m just suddenly lazy. Hmm.
I read that as cod-porno.
Googling cod-pomo got me two results.
Googling cod-porno got me 721.
I still don’t know what cod-pomo is.
Is this poetry?
🙂
Cod post-modern, i.e., sort-of post-modern
I’m getting sick of current affairs news programs putting on so many inane pieces about “hey, there’s this really weird thing available on the internet.” Do they do any research that actually involves walking around and talking to people any more?
I got four googles for cod-pomo, one of which was not English, two of which were this blog, the third being another blog. Morgue, either you’re cutting edge with your language, or…
Morgue, I am sorry about all the posts. Do delete them.
As for the blog comment itself, I think literature is indispensable. The Net tends in my experience to be both less formal and more conversational in style. The nature of literature is that it is one sided, and a lot of the ‘work’ involved in reading requires you the reader to be imaginative and fill in the inevitable blanks. I think that is why the ‘movie is almost always worse than the book’ because movies tend to only be shadows of the books they are trying to encapsulate. Even the LOTR which is utterly spectacular in almost every way, is just a shadow when placed beside the richness of Tolkien’s language.
And while I am a fan of the Net in almost every way, and it improves/facilitates my life in so many ways, I don’t yet know if I would call it indispensable.
Stephanie: exactly. The internet is such a boon for journalists – they can get more content written with less effort than ever before! (I don’t blame journos, who are by and large very dedicated folk; I blame the systems in which they are forced to work.)
KiZ: yeah, exactly. Well put. And those extra posts have been deleted!
The net is a great way to get the maximum unreliable and unverified information in the shortest space of time, so you can be vastly ill-informed instead of merely uninformed.
But it’s still better than television.
Lessing’s Canopus in Argos is one of my favourite science fiction series and I have read some of her other books, though found them less appealing.
You can find the speech here and it’s well worth a read http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html (Morgue, your link seems to be to the stuff article and I couldn’t find the link to the speech from that). The whole speech is long and like Morgue I felt that the thrust was more to do with the inequities between poor and rich countries, the value people place on books and education in different societies and of course the importance of a literary tradition. The two paragraphs pertaining to the internet are these:
“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.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” 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.”
Absolutely fair comment, I feel.
Lessing’s Canopus in Argos is one of my favourite science fiction series and I have read some of her other books, though found them less appealing.
You can find the speech here and it’s well worth a read http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html (Morgue, your link seems to be to the stuff article and I couldn’t find the link to the speech from that). The whole speech is long and like Morgue I felt that the thrust was more to do with the inequities between poor and rich countries, the value people place on books and education in different societies and of course the importance of a literary tradition. The two paragraphs pertaining to the internet are these:
“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.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” 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.”
Absolutely fair comment, I feel.