Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has said that the introduction of technology is creating a newgeneration of illiterates.
The literary icon stated this out at the CANEX Live Theatre closing ceremony of the 3rd Intra-African Trade Fair (IATF) 2023, in Cairo, Egypt, on Friday.
Soyinka said: I want us to understand that, on the other hand, theres a new culture taking place, about which we have to be very careful; I call it the Internet culture.
This is a marvelous technology; this is a liberating technology. The so-called Arab Spring, for instance, among many movements, was able to take life and be successful where theyve been utilising that culture of instant communication; these are positive.
However, as a new, tyrannical, insolent, and abusive culture, the culture of sub-mental humanity in our midst, which you can give the rough name of the new Internet culture, in which real creativity is being downgraded, even despised for cheap, populist, nasty, subversive, humanly subversive culture.
It is creating new generations of the illiterate, who believe it is up to them that its sort of noble, progressive, and populist to despise what I call the real meaningful culture which improves the mind of humanity, expands our horizons, offers numerous alternatives or interpretations of phenomena, et cetera, and leads to a new construct of a genuine new being.
He further said: Now, we have to watch this network-facilitated abuse of culture, especially the Nigerian society, the greatest abusers of that kind of culture, where you have the real degradation of the real meaning of culture, facilitated by Internet technology.
Thats why I said its a large subject, which we must not trivialise. We shouldnt take the easy way out. We shouldnt go on the axial, black and white, and so on. Its a work in progress; but we must not let the barbarians get away with this new project.
