Chris Berg! Oh he is that punk adolescent android that writes those banal one-dimensional columns in the Sunday Age. An archetypal example of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, who was given a diploma and therefore presumed he was "educated".

Meanwhile I much prefer the ideas and opinions of Doris Lessing (a student of Sufism) who has spent her entire life investigating, and writing about, the western psychosis and how it manifests and is dramatised on the world stage by both individually and collectively---bearing in mind that each and every so called "individual is ENTIRELY a product or clone of the necessarily collective culture in which he or she lives.

I spend a lot of time on the internet and most of it is incredibly banal, including the VAST MAJORITY of blogs. Every narcissistic fool
now has a means for broadcasting and displaying their banality to the entire world

A concise description of the "world"-view promoted by the IPA, which was, by the way, a policy/propaganda factory for the Howard government.

Western consumer civilization/culture as created in the image of a TV commercial and manifested AS the shopping mall is the most "advanced" form of culture ever seen on this planet.

What is a shopping mall? It is a Cathedral of the world wide "religion" of shopping/consumerism.

Its credo is "I shop therefore I am".

TV and other advertisements call the "faithful" (24 hours a day) to come and worship at the Cathedral as often as possible and to receive the blessings of the consumerist god in the form of bright shiny objects to "consume"---just as the faithful receive (and consume) their communion wafer at a Catholic mass.

It is a cargo cult, where somehow mysteriously, all these bright shiny objects magically appear day after day, and theoretically for ever---or so the "progress" story goes.

It is an ever growing world-wide cult which enthrones every person (male & female) as king and queen---or seems to.

But what WILL happen when consumer man becomes frustrated and the cargo no longer appears?

This reference provides a glimpse of what will happen when the cargo no longer appears. It also provides a shocking description of the dynamics of the grab it while you can "culture" of me.

1. http://www.ispeace723.org/youthepeople4.html

I'd just like to know what a free-market shop like the IPA is doing praising the Internet, given that the Internet owes relatively little to the free market, and a lot to government funding, publicly-owned infrastructure, and an enormous amount of not-for-profit volunteer work.

Indeed, it's hard to imagine something like the Internet would ever have got off the ground in a purely free-market world, where everything was done for personal profit.

(FWIW, I agree that it's absurd to blame the Internet for "replacing our previous appreciation of learning, education and literature". Indeed, I'd like to see proof that appreciation of learning, education and literature has ever been higher among the masses than it is today).

The web has long since justified its own existance and needs no sanction from Lessing. Projects like PostSecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ and Sourcewatch http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Disinfopedia_Main_Page and Wikipedia do things that no books ever could.

Does the web engender stupidity with over/misuse? Sure, but so do mainstream Australian schools, much sport, shopping and consumerism. Can we start running those down too?

“Does the web engender stupidity with over/misuse?” asks Liam. Well, Ho Hum says that “I spend a lot of time on the internet,” so there’s some evidence for the proposition. But in general, it’s a fantastic resource, which doesn’t prevent reading of books. I tend to have short net sessions and long book sessions, some of which is with works of which Lessing would approve. I’ve often bought books (for self or others) after catching references on the net.

Whilst being a fan of Doris Lessing, I would not agree entirely with her assertion that the internet is replacing reading. While it might intrude into the higher brow intellectual activities, it does not entirely replace them. While much of the internet is banal, the same can be said of most other media such as magazines, newspapers and even books.

Some might scorn the OLFs but considering that they are some of the greatest contributers I think this is hypocritical.

The answer is to be discriminating as to where you look and recognise each media as complementing each other rather than replacing. More teens are writing on the net than ever read books before and this can only be a good thing.

One of the certainties in life is change, to regret that life is not the same is nostalgic, to scorn that change is ignorance.