Consider Yourselves Schooled

When Doris Lessing took home this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, the 88-year-old author had this to say in her acceptance speech about the decline of printed books (as quoted in 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."

Wow. We just got schooled. As a blogger, but also someone who does read books in his spare time, I must say she has a point. Too many people never read anything more complex than a newspaper. Just so you know, most newspapers are written to a grade 8 reading level. I do wonder if thats the ultimate stage for many of us; a vocabulary considered by our educators to be that of a fourteen-year-old. Then I check what's on network TV, and my suspicions are, unfortunately, confirmed.

George Carlin once asked "where are all the bright young people of conscience, ready to step in and lead the way?" He then answers himself "... everyone's at the mall!"

Not to say that all the books out in your local big box bookstore are great either, perhaps the point is that we all need to be a bit more discriminating about what we read, regardless of the medium.