I have spent the bus ride home for the past few days reading a compendium of acceptance speeches for Nobel Prizes for Literature. Featured are Orhan Pamuk (personal and moving), Harold Pinter (thrillingly angry) and Seamus Heaney (surprisingly excellent, regarding the Troubles). What could be more fascinating, my dad said handing me the book, than a stage given to the greatest literary authors of our time to speak at length on whatever they please.
I have always been at the mercy of eloquent prose. As I read, I was dragged hither and thither by the beauty of the language, the roundness of the sentences. We are trapped by eloquence because to counter the argument is to deconstruct the text. To break open the timepiece. This is language’s great power — to deliver us our thoughts pre-made. Shiny and smooth for easy insertion.
On the bus, Dublin’s Q102 keens endlessly above my head. It is an incomprehensible wall of noise; advertisements thinly interspersed with jingle after jingle and lazy, empty content. My ears were pricked, so, when I heard Doris Lessing had taken a swipe at the Web in her Nobel Lecture. I read it and found it almost entirely about Africa. Newspaper coverage has been a joke. Unfair to the substance of the speech. That said, the Web is what I’m here to talk about, and this is what she says, in part:
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 about 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, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, 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, changed 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?” And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into 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 and blugging etc.
Please read the rest, though, to get the gist.
I spent an idle six months of my software degree in the IT department of a pharmaceutical company. In those aimless afternoons I discovered the Web. The good Web. The tight-knit core of people who write, who make, who do. Who want to better themselves and you too if you want it, and do it all for the love of the medium, or the craft, or the love of a human connection.
What is so wrong about Lessing’s impression of the Net is that it’s probably the one 20th century medium that does not actually go out of its way to dull you. 90% of modern culture has been carefully designed to make you more stupid than you are. To curb expansive thought. To distract you from righteous discontent. 90% of the Web is brain-deadening crap too — the difference is that, unlike almost every other modern medium, it doesn’t come looking for you. It isn’t broadcast loudly to you on buses, it doesn’t flicker hypnotically in the corner of every pub and cafe. It is a one-to-one experience, you take from it what you want, it will offer nothing more. It mirrors off-line culture in all its worthlessness and all its glory.
I credit that six-month discovery of the decent Web with saving me from computers, in a sense. Learning to demand more from the Internet led me to expect more quality off-line, too. To embrace the idea of self improvement, and that I might want more substantial nutrition from life and work than my path was leading me towards.
And it is unfair to expect a woman in her 80’s to accept the paradox of that, to expect her to understand the Web at all. I am 25, and already becoming reluctant to engage new trends and technologies. Her lack of understanding is evidenced by her inability to make a connection between the possibilities of “inane blogging” and her lament of the great African storytelling and writing that will go forever unread because of the lack of publishing opportunities.
I in no way wish to ridicule someone’s lack of understanding of the Web or technology. I just feel compelled, because no one else has, to stand up and say: Hey, wait. There is something good here, growing in the cracks. Something decent and honest and considered. There is literature, and craft. And always, a pat on the back and a word in your ear from someone who does not care what you look like, and may not even know, but appreciates what you have done in the name of self improvement.