Stifled by the Superfluities of the Internet
December 17, 2007 | Written by Clarke Levidiotis
Last Sunday, Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance lecture, she speaks a great deal about waste: the wasted talent of children who come of age in ignorance and poverty, the wasted books in the underutilized libraries belonging to the privileged class, and the wasted time people are inclined to spend dallying on the Internet.
Lessing does not trust the Internet. She does not like it. She points to the Internet not as a notable advancement in technology; but rather a source of infinite distraction, something that softens the mind and obscures the path to true knowledge and intelligence.
Lessing laments how a collective dependency on technology and all its marvels has replaced a respect and love of books and education. She wants to know why this has been blithely accepted when we should all be questioning what the impacts are of such a shift:
"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"
The notion that the Internet is detrimental to the advancement of humanity seems dramatic, but it is not implausible.
It is is hard not to believe that the Internet facilitates laziness. Innumerable processes (e.g., reading a newspaper, purchasing a gift, writing a letter) become infinitely easier when done online. Convenience to the degree that we've become accustomed is a bit frightening. We are lazy, and generations after ours will probably be even lazier.
Similarly, it makes sense that laziness breeds ignorance. After all, it is human nature to take for granted that which one doesn't work to achieve. If all knowledge no longer require any effort to obtain, it will shortly lose value to us. Before long, we will be back in the Dark Ages.
Or will we? Didn't laziness and sloth exist before the advent of the Internet?
Perhaps Lessing is pointing to something different than mere laziness: an inability to grasp the sacrifice made when indulging in the seductive conveniences of technology.
I recently spent an evening at the Carlyle Hotel, watching Woody Allen playing his clarinet in a jazz band. Both the performance and the setting conjured an image of classic New York. But somewhat muddling this romantic setting was the conspicuous flash of digital cameras persisting through the entire performance. Even more offensive, I thought, were the people in front of me with their arms raised overhead, filming the performance on their iPhones.
I was not only irritated, but also felt pity towards those with the compulsion to record the event taking place instead of simply enjoying it. It was as though they had missed the point entirely: can't anyone watch Woody Allen on film any time they want? When you're sitting in a bar five feet away from him, why would you have a camera held up to your eye the whole time?
To Lessing's point, and my own, I think her speech serves as a reminder that it is a pity to dilute the richness of life by an over-reliance on technology.
Digg It | Reddit | De.lic.ious | Facebook
