In Defense Of The Digital Age

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Limerick Day
Whitmonday (Christian)
Birthday - Katharine Hepburn (100th B'day)

 

Here’s a fun one for you: chairman_wow pointed me to the latest take on how Kids These Days Are Dumbasses And It’s All The Internet’s Fault. It’s an article (on, I would like to point out, the internet) showcasing a book by Mark Bauerlein, subtly titled The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. It offers eight of what we will loosely call “reasons” for this assertion, presented to you in nice, short, 1-2 sentence format, along with pictures to help illustrate that kids are dumb and can’t read.

 

I’d like to respectfully disagree with Author Mark Bauerlein on this subject, but the fact of the matter is that there’s very little respect about it. The arguments are sweeping generalizations and often illogical. But I still want to disagree with him because, frankly, I am one of those kids and I want to point out that we’re not all that stupid. So actually, what I’m gonna do on here is spitefully disagree with him. But maybe I’m biased. Maybe his book is a bit smarter in its presentation, and I can disagree with that with a modicum of real intelligence. As to this article, though, I just want to take it slide-by-slide, and point out everything wrong with the “reasons” Kids These Days are dumb as bricks because they blog:

1. The article says: They make excellent “Jaywalking” targets.

 

Ironically, I had to look up what he meant by “Jaywalking,” as I’ve never watched much of The Tonight Show. Seems it means that Jay Leno goes out and interviews people to see how much they know about current events, and the gimmick is that people are woefully ignorant of things you take for granted. I guess the idea is that kids don’t know what’s going on. And according to this article, the reason Kids These Days are more ignorant (although I’d really like to see some statistics to back that up) is the internet—that’s right, blame this lack of informedness on the information superhighway.

 

Really. The thesis is that the “digital age” is what’s dumbing us down, so I guess we’re to extrapolate that our use of the internet is what keeps us ignorant. The countless numbers of newsfeeds, current events search engines, citizen journalism, and running commentary provided by the internet do not faze this reasoning, because Kids These Days choose to ignore those. Of course, this was not true before the internet, when young people would dash to the newspaper to entertain themselves by poring over current events, or hurry to finish their homework so they could watch the evening news.

 

Come on. People’s willful ignorance of current events cannot be blamed on a medium that supplies the news. I can’t see how the internet would be to blame.

 

2. The article says: They don't read books -- and don't want to, either.

 

Yes, we bloggers hate us some books. That Neil Gaiman’s blog is one of the most popular on the internet, that people respect Wil Wheaton for his writing while they previously despised him for his TV acting, that so many bloggers like to review books and are working on writing their own books for fun and profit—or sometimes just for the grand hell of it—all attest to this pretty clearly. We hate books. Hell, look at the bad writing exhibited by so much fanfiction! The fact that these people are at least taking the time to write so much, not just about Harry Potter but also about such fancy shmancy literary classics as The Odyssey and the works of Edgar Allen Poe (just check Fanfiction.net’s book section), is clearly irrelevant. They go above and beyond just reading and try to emulate the authors just because they hate books.

 

(Also, I want to know why reading books is so damn edifying in and of itself. Yes, I myself am a voracious reader and there's a lot of good stuff in books, but why is it so important that we all sit around and read as versus appreciate other narrative media? And then of course there’s all that stuff about what we should read, and what’s intelligent and what’s not. It’s tough to keep track.)

 

3. The article says: They can't spell.

 

Really? Are we really going to do this?

 

Okay, buddy. You started it. You are telling us the amazing news that IMs, specifically, contain atrocious spelling errors. I can do you one better! Did you know that, in everyday spoken conversations, people often use sentence fragments? And colloquialisms? MY GOD! Casual conversation does not use the same conventions as formal speech/writing!

 

As well carry around Strunk and White’s Elements of Style while listening to chatting friends and judge them by whether they adhere to the rules. This is casual conversation we’re talking about.

 

4. The article says: They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing

 

I’m a little confused by this argument, so I’m going to put the full text up here:“On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you,'' Bauerlein says. Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free. Often the most clever students, with flashes of disorganized brilliance on MySpace, switch to dull Wiki-writing formats for school papers, he says. "If we could combine the style and imagination of MySpace with the content of Wikipedia, we might get good stuff."

 

I honestly am not sure what this is saying. What are we supposed to be writing, and where? Are we supposed to write treatises in our journals? Or cheerful chatty rants or to-do lists in the encyclopedia or as our theses? They're two very different styles of writing, and often style is constrained by the format of school papers themselves, which are much more restrictive than even other academic styles.

 

This is, of course, assuming that bloggers are all haphazard, which eclipses the way so many of my friends actually do write. It’s amazing that so many Kids These Days are willing to sit down and articulate their thoughts on a given topic without it being assigned. I’ve never gotten ridiculed for my more thoughtful and academic-style entries. Perhaps I need to find more typical readers.

 

5. The article says: Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.

 

… So what? Okay, this header requires a bit further explanation to make any sense. Here is the full reasoning as presented by this article:

 

1. Kid buys Grand Theft Auto IV or some other video game.

2. [A few steps are skipped here]

3. Kid winds up in remedial reading or writing classes in college.

 

Once again, unwillingness to focus on studies is blamed on the things Kids These Days elect to do instead. I remember missing more than a few homework assignments because I was reading, but I never hear people blaming books. I also want to know if perhaps there’s a problem with the schools that are supposed to educate the kids before college; if the failure is so massive, it pays to look at all the possible reasons.

This also makes the common logical error that correlation equals causation. That many kids play video games and many kids wind up in remedial classes may correlate, but that does not imply that one causes the other. The Flying Spaghetti Monster parody illustrates this fallacy well with its correlation of declining numbers of pirates the rise in global warming. They may correlate, but they aren't necessarily related.

 

An interesting, but extremely long, case can be made for the fact that video games like Grand Theft Auto are actually much more intelligent than games of previous generations (Super Mario Bros. is a great game, but it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to figure out that you are on the left side and have to get to the right side.  "Avoid the goombas" is the most complicated part of the game.) However, Steven Johnson already made this case in Everything Bad Is Good For You, a book that might just annihilate itself and Bauerlein’s book in a bright flash of light upon contact.

 

6. The article says: They don't store the information.

 

Actually, in and of itself, this is true. People from cultures without written history and with a strong oral history exhibit a better ability to memorize than do cultures with written histories, and memorization died out further at the invention of the printing press when suddenly books became more available. (That would suggest that books are actually also an agent of dumbing down. Maybe it’s a good thing Kids These Days stay away from them!) Now that we have an internet, information is even more accessible. So sure, it’s possible that we won’t store as much (although I can say from observations of the encyclopedic knowledge internet nerds often have of everything from Ancient Rome to Star Trek, if there is a change it seems to be negligible).

 

But does this make us dumber, or does it free up mental space for other things, like analysis and understanding? Rote education is not exactly popular these days; maybe losing the recitation allows more freedom to find connections, synthesize information creatively, and add new knowledge to what we’ve got stored. There is, after all, a lot of information out there, and it’s good that we’ve got a place to put it where we can get to it if we need it without the distortions of human memory.

 

7. The article says: Because their teachers don't tell them so.

 

Nor do parents, it adds. Mom’s constant nagging at us to turn off those damn video games and come to dinner, and teachers’ attempts to talk to us, don’t penetrate the digital fog of young self-absorption that surrounds us. But the article is arguing it two ways. The article blames the teachers and parents in that pithy header, but then it quotes Bauerlein: “‘Kids are drowning in teen stuff delivered 24/7 by the tools [presumably digital tools], and adult realities can't penetrate.’” So if you unravel the argument, it’s saying that adults are not trying hard enough, but it would not matter even if they did because we are not paying attention.

 

Whoa, dude! There’s an entirely new situation for you: generations have trouble connecting. Thank god we have someone to point out that Kids These Days Don’t Listen. Sure, this time we’ve got digital means to block out our wise and venerable elders, but you only have to watch a few educational films from the 1950s addressing the problems of juvenile delinquency (I Accuse My Parents, The Violent Years, both of which put a lot of blame on the parents as well*) or read about the dim view Socrates and Hesiod (supposedly) took toward young people to realize that the internet and the cell phone aren’t the cause of this problem.

 

8. The article says: Because they're young

 

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the digital argument at all. chairman_wowsummed up this one up beautifully: “the last [argument] is ‘this generation of teenagers is the dumbest because they're teenagers.’” Perhaps so, but most of us (even those of us who aren’t teenagers anymore but are still under 30) can spot circular logic when we encounter it. If he wants to argue that this generation is the dumbest in comparison to other generations, he cannot also argue that it is the dumbest generation because it is at the point where all generations are dumb.

 

But let’s use his logic for a minute. I would like to respectfully submit, then, that the dumbest generation is in fact the generation that is currently neonatal to about four years old. I mean, look at the little morons. Babies can’t even spell their own names, or form coherent sentences. Dumbass kids probaby don’t even know how to dress themselves, and their table manners are atrocious. Given their appalling stupidity, what with their being young and all, I’d say that we should be afraid for our future. Can you imagine this lot running the world, as they’ll be doing in a few decades? We’re screwed.

 

 

Well, I guess one of the messages you can get from the examples of generation-gap griping through the years is that it’s probably not going to go away.  We’re always going to have people like Bauerlein around blaming TV or automobiles or pants or those darned computervideogames for making kids dumb and disrespectful.  And when I get old and it’s my turn to look at the new generation, I hope I remember this before I start griping myself. Because chances are my reasons will make as much sense as these will.

 

 

*Yes, I got these examples from my own MST3k obsession. See? I’m analyzing stuff I entertain myself with!

Comments

[nobleplatypus]

Heh. I like the part where he accuses teens of writing their papers in duller language than they write their blogs. Last I checked, it's called a scholarly tone, and PROFESSORS REQUEST IT. When I tried writing my essays using the same "voice" I use on my blog, I was pretty much told outright that I didn't sound stuffy enough. :P

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what kind of writing and in what context it's supposed to be in there. Academic writing is a lot different from blogging. (Granted, I think scholarly tone has a whole lot wrong with it--academic writing is its own little pissing contest. But that's beside the point entirely.)

[nobleplatypus]

Yeah, I resisted scholarly writing for a bit because I thought it made me sound like a presumptuous blowhard. Then my profs called me on it, so I threw up my hands and played along. :P I think I managed to find a happy-medium by the time my thesis rolled around.

I do think there are ways in which the internet can really screw with people, particularly in the area of communication--but this man doesn't mention them. Typical.