Monday, December 10, 2007

Doris Lessing: The internet is making you dumb

TechCrunch rips into Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she points the finger at computers to help explain the fragmentation in our culture:
Whilst Lessing’s words should be taken somewhat in context: the ditherings of an ignorant old woman, Keensian (as in Andrew Keen) anti-internet speeches grow as the cultural elite in society continue to have their previous (often born-in-to) positions eroded. The likes of Andrew Keen and Doris Lessing ignore the many benefits the internet has provided in expanding access to knowledge to many, many more people than who may otherwise have had no access before. Whilst it may be easy to mock the utterances of hundreds of millions of bloggers and social networking site users, the 21st century will be remembered as the time that communication was democratized, a time where the power of a few was replaced by the power of many. Let them eat their elitist intellectual cake, because the world is changing for the better, and there is nothing they can do to stop this.
I'll just point out that the computer is way, way behind the automobile in terms of fragmenting culture.
Nobel Laureate Says The Internet Makes Us Dumb, We Say: Meh

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