NSW LearnScope Blog & Podcast

Oh dear…..

It’s a sad day when advocates of rights and voice demonstrate such ignorance regardless of their age.
In her recent acceptance speech for the Nobel prize for literature Doris Lessing spoke of how the internet, has ’seduced a whole generation into its inanities’ and created a world where people know 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.’ (SMH 2007)

Having relatively good literacy skills despite my hours online, I knew of course that the media are selective about what they publish (online at least – I’m sure anything off a printing press can be believed) so I headed with trepidation further into the web…..

First I went to her retrospective website (yes she does have one) where she assured me that she is ‘so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic’ and where we can find links to all her interviews, audio files and discussion forums. Perhaps we, her fans, can email her, engage in some debate, she could share pictures of her life?

Then I went straight to her Nobel Lecture …

Here she speaks of “getting books into the villages” of Zimbabwe. Books like the Mayor of Casterbridge and Anna Karenina. Reading is more than decoding Doris.

25 years ago I walked as teacher into a remote Aboriginal community where there were books. They spoke of pretty children in frilly dresses with their dog in the snow, not of gathering mangrove worms or crocodiles or Pukamani. Oh how I wish I had the internet then to supplement my camera and hand made books.

‘The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise … but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.’ (Lessing 2007)

You may ask, she says, ‘how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?’ ‘It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.’

Perhaps they will, a child with a plastic laptop who can speak to the world.

[image:DCMetblogger]