The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don 't Trust Anyone Under 30)
Mark Bauerlein
Language: English
Pages: 253
ISBN: 1585427128
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.
The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture.
For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. But at the dawn of the digital age, many thought they saw an answer: the internet, email, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their knowledge and understanding of technology to set themselves apart as the vanguards of this new digital era.
That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen. The technology that was supposed to make young adults more aware, diversify their tastes, and improve their verbal skills has had the opposite effect. According to recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts, most young people in the United States do not read literature, visit museums, or vote. They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount basic American history, name their local political representatives, or locate Iraq or Israel on a map. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future is a startling examination of the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American culture and democracy.
Over the last few decades, how we view adolescence itself has changed, growing from a pitstop on the road to adulthood to its own space in society, wholly separate from adult life. This change in adolescent culture has gone hand in hand with an insidious infantilization of our culture at large; as adolescents continue to disengage from the adult world, they have built their own, acquiring more spending money, steering classrooms and culture towards their own needs and interests, and now using the technology once promoted as the greatest hope for their futures to indulge in diversions, from MySpace to multiplayer video games, 24/7.
Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up? Drawing upon exhaustive research, personal anecdotes, and historical and social analysis, The Dumbest Generation presents a portrait of the young American mind at this critical juncture, and lays out a compelling vision of how we might address its deficiencies. The Dumbest Generation pulls no punches as it reveals the true cost of the digital age—and our last chance to fix it.
Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent
I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
Isn’t always so condescendingly benign. In fall 2004, I joined a panel of faculty members at the University of Maryland to discuss, once again, reading trends for young adults and their implications for American culture. Facing about 250 students, I told them the truth, reciting the findings of several knowledge surveys as the inevitable outcome of not reading. Their interests lead them in polar directions, their knowledge running to zero in areas of civics, history, etc., while rising to a.
Behind them. Absorbed in “the policing of correctness in employee prose,” he alleges, they damage the very children they claim to help: “I am struck by how mean and weak their hopes are for our students and our future society.” Literary traditionalists might agree that the benchmarks overemphasize verbal skills suitable for the workplace and downplay humanistic learning, which includes immersion in the best literary traditions. But more Chaucer, Blake, and Woolf isn’t what Bomer has in mind.
Job.” On average, the subjects in the study log six hours and 21 minutes a day. And because they spend many of those minutes multitasking, playing a video game while listening to the radio, for instance, eight- to 18-year-olds actually take in eight and one-half hours of media content. Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of kids who consume different media in an average day and for how long:• watch television: 84 percent (3:04 hours) • use a computer: 54 percent (48 minutes in online usage.
Them, or a mentor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, or politics a helpful undertaking. Grossman speaks of Twixter years as “a chance to build castles and knock them down,” but these castles haven’t a grain of intellectual sand in them. As these young people forge their.
Remarks on their protests, not to mention the many letters The Nation printed subsequently, hardly any traces of theories, ideas, arguments, books, or thinkers emerge. Everything is topical. They never ascend to reflective declarations such as “Doubt has replaced hopefulness—and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic,” as the Port Huron Statement does. “While SDSers are extraordinarily skillful at dissecting race, gender, class and sexuality in their personal lives,” Phelps writes,.