Youth seduced by internet's 'inanities', says Lessing

The winner of this year's Nobel prize for literature, Doris Lessing, has warned of the dangers of the internet, and defended the continued importance of books. In her Nobel lecture, the British novelist says a whole generation have been seduced by what she calls the inanities of the internet, creating a fragmented culture in which people read nothing and know nothing of the world. But while people in wealthy countries were turning their backs on literature, Doris Lessing says there is still an astonishing hunger for books in the developing world.

Which will, of course, evaporate just as soon as they have the same kind of access to the internet, TV and film as the wealthy countries now have. Doh! Lessing is one of those tedious, irrelevant, outdated writers who complain about modern developments like 't'internet and blogging without themselves having any experience of them at all. They then have the gall to criticise the young for having no knowledge of the world. Lessing wrote her 'breakthrough novel' back in the sixties when just about every novel being written had as its central character a writer trying to come up with a 'breakthrough novel'. In Lessing's case the central character happens to be a woman writng about her experiences of, oooh, lets guess, Central Africa, the Communist Party and a broken love affair, in other words, Lessing's life up until then. Oh, what an imagination that woman had (her and hundreds of other boring writers writing about 'the process of writing'). Not so much 'navel gazing-writing' as 'disappearing up your own arse-writing'.

Lessing went the way of most ex-Communist, consciousness-raising feminist writers from the sixties. She got cynical, misanthropic and fatalistic. In other words, she became an old woman. Lessing just can't understand why anyone would rather spend hours surfing the web rather than ploughing through her self-indulgent 'The Golden Notebook'. And that, as they say, is her problem.