Nobel Prize in Literature winner Doris Lessing thinks that television and the Internet is responsible for the cultural decline of modern society.
From ars technica:
“And just as we never once stopped to ask, 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.” It is now common, she says, 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.”
Yeah, she is probably right. And yet, it is not my fancy liberal arts education that is paying my rent, but my knowledge of … computers.
Doris Lessing is also, quite simply, a crotchety woman who courts controversy. Not to take away from the relevance of her remarks, but it’s true. She’s a tough broad, she would probably have no problem with some “blugger” calling her crotchety.