{"id":685,"date":"2007-12-12T08:28:04","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T08:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=685"},"modified":"2007-12-12T08:28:04","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T08:28:04","slug":"mediawatch-doris-lessing-and-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=685","title":{"rendered":"[mediawatch] Doris Lessing And The Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.
\nOne 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<\/em> 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.)
\nThe 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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmm. If you take a look at the speech itself<\/a> 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.)
\nSo 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.
\nIt’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.
\nOne 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.
\n—
\nI’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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading [mediawatch] Doris Lessing And The Internet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-b3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}