Lament not, and learn

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature are entitled to grand pronouncements, or else what is it for? So Doris Lessing, last winter, anathematised the entire internet, declaring that it had 8220;seduced a whole generation into its inanities8221;. The web helped to create 8220;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 world8221;. How many of these young men and women had she met, and held conversations with? But Lessing has received confirmation from much more contemporary quarters. In the

Atlantic Monthly, the headline over a major article by Nicholas Carr asked: 8220;Is Google making us stupid?8221; to which Carr8217;s answer was a Dorisian affirmation. Not long afterwards, Bryan Appleyard penned a long piece entitled 8220;Stoooopid8230; why the Google generation isn8217;t as smart as it thinks8221;8230;

8220;Once,8221; wrote Carr, 8220;I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.8221; The culprit was the net, which8230; seemed to be 8220;chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation8221;8230; Carr8217;s view was that there are two kinds of reading: deep reading, which 8212; essentially 8212; is books, and web reading, where all we8217;re doing is the much lesser decoding of information. With the net and its instant access to information we turn into 8220;pancake people8221;, widely and thinly spread8230;

The challenge is not to lament, but to equip, to teach ourselves how to search and how to discriminate.

Excerpted from a comment by David Aaronovitch in 8216;The Times8217;