Yesterday's article about Megan Meier, the Missourian 13-year-old who was cyberbullied by a crazed neighborhood mom until she hanged herself with a belt last year, made us think twice, again, about this whole 'internet' thing. 12-year-olds are saying things like, "Once you're on MySpace, you're trapped. You spend all your time online just trying to keep the negative stuff about you from spreading." And: "It's like I can't even do anything because everybody is sitting there with a cellphone just waiting for me to mess up." Seriously, guys, it is nice being able to look up movie times and look at LOLcats, but in general the whole thing should be shut down. [NYT]

Last night Doris Lessing accepted the Nobel Prize for literature with a speech about how, amidst the desperate poverty she has witnessed in Africa, people there are still hungry for books and education. She says that we in the word-glutted West must relearn the value of literature and reading. "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?" She continues: "We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency."