Net Dumbs Us Down: Nobel Prize Winner

New Nobel laureate Doris Lessing has used her acceptance speech to rail against the internet, saying it has "seduced a whole generation into its inanities" and created a world where people know nothing.

Lessing, 88, who won this years Nobel Prize for Literature, lamented the apparent discrepancy in the hunger for books between developing countries like Zimbabwe and the rest of the world.

In August, Elton John, another creative type for whom the internet has opened up a sea of fresh competition, lambasted the web for stifling creativity, even calling for it to be shut down.

"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," she said in the speech read out by Lessings British publisher as she was too ill to travel to Sweden for the Nobel festivities.

She compared her visits to resource-deprived schools in Zimbabwe, where students begged her for books and taught themselves to read using labels on jam jars, to a trip to another school in North London where teachers complained that many students never read books at all and the library was only half used.

Lessing said no one had thought to ask how our lives would 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".

Similarly, author Andrew Keen argued in his new book, The Cult of the Amateur, that the internet was killing culture and assaulting economics.

"[Anyone] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels," Keen wrote in the book.

But Lessing, who becomes the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, barely acknowledges the internets positive side, short of calling it an "amazing invention".

She said little about the opportunity for internet users to freely browse reams of information they may otherwise not have the time or know-how to seek out. She also ignored the fact that blogging has given a voice to millions who would otherwise be writing little or nothing at all.

"In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition," she said.

As people increasingly obtained their information from the internet, a "treasure-house of literature", going back to ancient times, was being ignored, said Lessing.

Lessing, who grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), also used the lecture, titled "On not winning the Nobel Prize" to condemn President Robert Mugabes "reign of terror" and its effects on literature and budding writers in the country. Her work often draws on her experiences in Africa.

Lessing was described by the Swedish Academy, which has awarded the Nobel Prize since 1901, as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

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