In December of 2007, Dorris Lessing created an acceptance speech for her Noble prize for literature by telling a story, as reported in the The Guardian, titled, A hunger for books. She reflected on her accounts to Africa and explained how she had seen the hunger for books and libraries in the natives hearts. Lessing described the countries’ youth as literate, underprivileged, and whom were begging for books.
Lessing goes on to describe her findings to children in civilized territories like North England; expecting the same passion and hunger for literature. Lessing says, “Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”"
Lessing suggests that computers and the internet are like an addiction that have changed our way of thinking, and have created a revolution. Lessing says, “What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution 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, transformed 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?” In the same way, 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 etc?”
Just six months after Lessing’s speech, Nicholas Carr shared similar views, in his article titled, Is Google Making us Stupid? Carr says, “…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”.
I find it interesting that Carr posted a portion of Lessing’s speech on his blog the day before it was published in The Guardian. Perhaps Lessing’s speech was the inspiration for prompting the creation of “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Carr, however, does share the same view point as Lessing when he mentions that the way we think, or how we take information has changed due to the internet. Lessing and Carr sound like two old songbirds that are afraid of change and/or of technology, by creating an atmosphere through their writing, that make it apear like it is in our (the rest of the world) best interests to avoid using any informative source other than the printed text book.
Lessing says, “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, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
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