The New Zeland Herald reports that, Doris Lessing, too ill to attend the Nobel Awards Ceremony in Stockholm, had her publisher read her speech to the attendees. She lambasted the web for the “dumbing-down effect” it is having on society. “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,” asked Lessing. “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 about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.” Critics of the speech think that though Lessing has a point, she is more likely showing her age in not understanding the web. Lessing referred to a trip she made to Zimbabwe where she found classrooms without books, or an atlas, or a map on the wall. Teachers there begged for books. She sees a waste of talent in such third world countries, where there are no publishers to recognize new voices. On the flip side of this argument, it is through the Internet that new voices can be heard through blogs and self-published works. The Internet can empower millions, bridging the so-called digital divide by disseminating literature, a point, the newspaper claims, that Lessing misses.