The net is more a friend than foe to book lovers
Recently, I attended a party at a house where there just didn't seem to be any books. Not one. Not even in the loo.
Laden with modish furnishings, blinging up-to-the-second technology and one of those painfully trendy (read 'baldy' and 'dull') avant-garde Christmas trees, their home could have been straight out of Vogue's style pages.
But still, no books. Perhaps, I thought, this couple's taste in literature is not quite so 'refined' as their discerning palette for this season's must-have soft furnishings. Maybe if I had rooted about for long enough I might have discovered a secret closet rammed full of Mills and Boon sauciness, or a bottom drawer buckling under the weight of this year's canon of Z-list celebrity biographies. Possibly, but with not a single, solitary dog-eared paperback in sight, I could not help but feel suspicious.
The chic bookless pad came to mind earlier this week when I read about the novelist Doris Lessing's complaints about a similar phenomenon, albeit on a considerably larger scale (and infinitely more eloquent).
Last weekend, Lessing accepted the Nobel Prize for literature with a heartfelt and moving speech about how, amidst the desperate poverty she has witnessed in Africa, people there are still hungry for books and education. In a clarion call for our society to relearn the value of literature and reading, the novelist contrasted her visits to resource-deprived schools in Zimbabwe, where students desperately needed new books and often taught themselves to read using labels on jam jars, to a trip to a school in London where teachers complained that many of its students never read books at all and that the library was only half used. So far, so honorable.
According to the esteemed Ms Lessing then, precisely who or what is to blame for our insouciant swapping of Eliot, Tolstoy, and Austen for pretentious art, 'feature' walls and bookcases lightly peppered with meaningless, minimalist tat?
Why, that universal habitat for pornographers, paedophiles and perverts of course; that devious, dark societal underbelly and diseased domain of freaks and criminals that we commonly call the internet. "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?" asks the Nobel winner. Indeed. But who knew this most celebrated of authors has been spending so much time reading my Facebook comments?
Actually, as Lessing admitted on a radio interview with Mark Lawson on Monday, she really does not have much use for the internet herself, she isn't quite sure how to work it properly, and she most definitely has no time for all that "blogging and blagging" piffle.
To Lessing, the whole of the internet is comprised of stupid, idle people hooked on mindless blogging and unremitting time wasting (I for one could not possibly argue with that).
Nevertheless, if she had taken the time to look more carefully at what the internet has to offer – and at the grand old age of 88, why in the heck should she? – Lessing probably would have adopted a more sophisticated view of the relationship between book culture and the web. Perhaps it is somewhat inevitable for an elder practitioner of a profession to be a tad apprehensive about major new technology and the rapid modernisation of their field. No doubt the fifteenth-century scribes with their trusty trade tools of parchment, quill and ink were just as sniffy about Johannes Gutenberg when he invaded the manuscript scene with his oh-so-fancy printing press.
Without wishing to jump on the anti-Lessing/pro-internet bandwagon that has been dominating blogosphere this week, (with cyber geeks the world over emphatically defending their realm from attack by, ahem, furiously blogging about it), the author's assertion that the internet can be blamed for the demise of book reading is both nave and speculative.
From e-books and online library catalogues to cheap secondhand bookshops and free online newspapers, the web avidly encourages a love of reading and literature. Even plodding through the 'inanities' of chatrooms and eBay, one would not get very far if they did not read along the way, would they?
What the inimitable Ms Lessing does not realise is that for both readers and writers alike, the internet is ultimately a friend, not a foe. Where else did I read Doris Lessing's (otherwise exemplary) Nobel acceptance speech, or hear her post-Nobel interviews but on the web. The Internet, like most forms of communication – from the television to the phone book to carrier pigeon - is ultimately what you make of it.
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Saturday 04 February 2012
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