I was recently reading Dorris Lessing’s Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech (full text here). It’s an excellent read, a story of storytelling, that recalls her experiences in Africa and the influence of books on a writer. I strongly recommend all to read it. However, as inspirational as it is, there is also a strong feeling of cynicism towards the culture heralded on by the technology revolution, and some points worth thinking about. Here is a short quote:

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 speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution 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, transformed 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?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced 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 etc?”

I found it strange how she describes the printing revolution as something good, by allowing “voices unheard” to wield their talent, but the internet revolution as something meaningless, fragmenting, and wasteful. It seems to either imply that publishers have been given the divine gift of knowing what is good to publish, or that people (are dumb, and) lack the collective knowledge to find what is worth reading. Is there no such thing as collective wisdom? Does a change of medium naturally imply a change in content and quality? Perhaps her words reflect Toffler’s predictions, or it is impossible for her to find any quality in the chaotic community that we call the web?

After all, her message came to me by means of blogs and online news. Any thoughts?