KEY POINTS:
The great British writer Doris Lessing has given her obligatory Nobel lecture after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. And a lecture it certainly was.
Lessing (88), who was too ill to present the speech itself - it was read out by her publisher, joined
a number of writers, most notably Andrew Keen with his book The Cult of the Amateur in lambasting the web for the dumbing-down effect it is having on society.
"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," asked Lessing.
"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."
While Lessing, like Keen, has a valid point - the dangerous tendency of the web to elevate the trivial and sensational, she's showing her age in writing off the web.
Google her name for instance and the first result is a link to Google Books which has indexed the text of her books in their entirety allowing web users anywhere to read from them.
Someone should have told Lessing about the One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) programme and the XO computer which would have had particular relevance to her speech.
Lessing spoke about a trip she made to Zimbabwe in the early eighties, during which she witnessed: "Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall.
A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books."
Thanks to Robert Mugabe, a similar situation exists in Zimbabwe today. But thanks to the internet, wireless networking technology, cheap laptops and open source software, it's relatively inexpensive to get books in digital form and learning materials to children living in Third World conditions.
Lessing continues in her speech: "Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
"Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential."
Again, the internet has a huge, empowering role to play in allowing voices to be heard. Who needs a publisher when you can self-publish on the internet, even set up a blog using free blogging software?
The internet is the place where the next generation of African writers is likely to be discovered. They'll be writing their own blogs, self-publishing their own novels and coming to the attention of the publishing houses of New York and London as a result.
Lessing is shrewd enough to know one thing: "What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution." And you have to admire her strident belief in the power of books and reading.
But the one crucial area where the internet can empower millions, bridge the so-called digital divide, is in disseminating literature. It's a shame Lessing wasn't able to grasp the potential.
