Don't go messing with Doris Lessing.....

...well not with a PC anyway. Doris Lessing's Nobel speech reported in the Grauniad, on the subject of the 'Net:

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 of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

She's dead wrong...I have kids, they are glued to the Net, and they know a darn sight more about the world than I did at their age (and I was educated in the way she would have thought of as "good" and am still a total bookworm). There is just so much more information there - not just in Wikipaedia, but if you play Rome Total War you get to know your Goth from your Lombard, and I reckon the skills of running a small empire in Civilisation are pretty advanced for a 10 year old - even Alexander had to wait till he was in his 20's

This is more to the point:

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "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?"

Its the changing of the guard, the shift from one comme medium to another, and those who do well under the old system resist the new, as one Machiavelli once noted. Plus its the old Circle of LIfe thingy........the Old Elite get their Nobels, the Young Turks get pictured barfing on Facebook.....it was ever thus - just read Henry IV Part 1 .

For the Record...its hard to take serious Authors seriously after hearing the Moxy Fruvous song "My Baby Loves a bunch of Authors" - enjoy