Nobel prize winner Lessing warns against 'inane' internet - Maev Kennedy <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/maevkennedy> - The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>, - Saturday December 8 2007
The inanities of the internet have seduced a generation, and we live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, the new Nobel laureate novelist Doris Lessing warned yesterday. Lessing, described by the Nobel committee as "that epicist of the female experience", has been in poor health, and the £750,000 Nobel prize for literature was presented yesterday in London, while a recording of her acceptance speech was relayed to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm. Her tone was profoundly pessimistic. Although she is still working hard at the age of 87, and she insisted the world would always need stories and storytellers, she also warned: "Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books. 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. "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." She contrasted her experiences in Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa, where people were hungry and clamouring for books even though they might have no food, where schools might not have a single book and a library might be a plank seat under a tree. She was bitterly critical of the impact of the regime of President Mugabe on the country where she was brought up and educated. "It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe." A good paperback shipped from England used to cost a month's wages, she said. "That was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages." Lessing was equally withering about the merchandising of the modern publishing industry, and said she felt sorry for young writers. "We cynically inquire: is she good-looking? If this is a man: charismatic? Handsome? We joke, but it is not a joke. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to."
