There was a bit of buzz today around recent Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s comments that “blogging and blugging” (how awesome is that?) is yet another thing that’s ‘destroying our culture’. Lessing argued, quite eloquently, that we are one the cusp of a radical social and philosophical change and that, given the pace and significance of the shift, we might want to think about where we are headed.

Predictably, the ‘internet defense force’ leapt into action, with Duncan Riley decrying Lessing as an “ignorant old woman” and Mathew Ingram (who I usually dig) arguing that Lessing’s comments were a sort of intellectual fetishism. But why the response? What was it that Lessing said that was so reprehensible? She suggested that the internet is full of ‘inanities’ – and it is. She argued that the lack of a common cultural heritage due to the fracturing of popular and mainstream culture is making social cohesion more difficult – it is. That doesn’t make it wrong necessarily, but it is. Lessing is arguing that the increasing fragmentation of culture is resulting in a less comprehensive view of broad, global ideological happenings. While it’s inarguable that we have access to far more information about the world, it is equally true that our response to that information is not always to learn more but, rather, it is to focus more specifically on our own locale or speciality. So why did the blogosphere erupt?

This, I think, is a significant problem with us bloggers: criticism is not welcome, especially from the outside and particularly from those who are somehow considered to be part of the old guard of media or art. But if we are to really acknowledge the power of what we do on a day-to-day basis, then we need to acknowledge that we are part of a social revolution and that there are downsides to all social revolutions, this one included. A drop in the sort of literacy entailed by reading literature and ‘books’ is one we need to deal with – not by printing manuscripts and building libraries but by engaging the hard stuff in the shift from the textual: depth, challenge, personal space, subjectivity and how all those things related to reading. There is nothing inherent about ‘the screen’ that will prevent us from thinking through things in a serious way and it’s vital that we do. So, let’s not throw Lessing out of the window for now – the ‘ignorant old woman’ might have something to tell us yet.