Nobel Prize Winner Doris Lessing Rails Web Users

I gotta be honest. Having opened my trusty ol’ PowerBook this morning and looked the latest bits from my favorite feeds, I’ve so far seen almost nothing of immediate interest that I think worth picking apart. Some of the stuff’s recycled material. Various opinions on where the Web is headed in ’08. Tedious Facebook talk. Something about Nokia downplaying speculative predictions of Apple’s and/or Google’s growing influence in the mobile space. You know, just a bunch of fluff, more or less. Filler, that’s all.

One single item, however, managed to jump out from the rest. No, it’s not about the latest Web app. It’s not even anything that concerns any single or select number of tech-centric businesses. Rather, it has to do with the Internet as a whole, and involves a statement made by Doris Lessing, a woman recently awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature.

Yeah, you’ve probably seen this little nugget already. Probably caught your eye immediately. It’s got all the necessary ingredients to do so, after all. There we see Doris Lessing, an author renowned for her work, delivering her acceptance speech - via a recording, mind you - over the weekend for the honor bestowed by the Nobel society (and the bucket of cash, of course) upon her many volumes of prose. And, well, there’s no beating around the bush, is there? She spent a good portion of her time giving thanks, and then spent a good portion criticizing all lovers of technology everywhere. Yep, ‘tis true. She pretty much railed generations that have followed her own for being seduced by the Web and for propagating digital “inanities” all across the globe.

The blogosphere was naturally all over the story. They parsed Lessing’s address, leveling ridicule at her accusations of the “fragmenting of culture”, and have vociferously repudiated the prize winner’s claim that the 21st century - one in which millions and millions are occupied by countless digital conveniences - is defined by a reality where “people read nothing and know nothing of the world.”

Now, I’m not going to waste your time here and try to defend Lessing’s contentious points through and through. I myself find the woman’s opinion as to the dangerously increased ignorance of peoples of modern society thoroughly asinine. People today fortunate enough to get hold of the kilobits/megabits/terabits of data made freely available by countless sources are obviously far more knowledgeable (on the whole) of international occurrences than the bulk of their respective ancestries. That’s unquestionably the case.

But I’ll go out on a limb here and second her assertion of the dissolution of cultures. Not to say that borders, which are now more and more easily supplanted, need be maintained, protected, or even increasingly fortified. No, it’s clearly a good thing for international communication to proceed at current pace. But there is certainly a palpable sense that globalization – by trade of tangible goods as well as virtual – has “watered down” cultural uniquities, perhaps to the detriment of societies throughout the world.

Yes, the picture one sees of the cohesion of cultures today is a fantastic one. But in some cases cohesion turns to consolidation, and once consolidation takes strong root (as, I presume, Lessing believes she has indeed witnessed occur), the volume of colors which now beautifully contrast with one another may shrink in number. Which effectively portends a future of fewer differences to celebrate. And to my mind, such a future looks rather boring.

So there we have a fine line. Part of which has been drawn by old industrial and economic forces; part of which has been drawn - with ever greater precision – by new industrial and economics forces. One such new force is, I’m sure you’ll agree, the Internet.

Hence Lessing’s tirade. Or rant. Or whatever you want to call it. (At least I think that’s why she spoke out. If not…oops.)