adambohannon

According to Mark Bauerlein, yes.  This morning an article from the LA Times was brought to my attention that briefly summarizes Bauerlein’s thoughts regarding the effects of the changing media environment on young folks, thoughts which he published in his book with the catchy, market-ready title The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). The article points out as one of Bauerlein’s primary concerns that today’s “youth” is preoccupied with peer-to-peer interaction and the pull of social life online which, evidently, precludes them from taking part in and certainly appreciating the more sophisticated “adult world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book.”

If you think that last sentence would read more appropriately by placing capital letters on each of those words, feel free to go back and change them.  I’ll wait.

Now, not having read his book, I don’t intend this to be an all out critique.  It would be more appropriate to call this an expression of concern.  Reading the rest of the article, you get a sense that Bauerlein understands “intelligence” to be the sheer ability to remember and recall facts, which in and of themselves are, well, useless.  Many people have been calling our attention to the impractical nature of multiple choice tests for a long time (e.g. Neil Postman), which among other things place a high premium on the memorizing and recalling of facts (only to be forgotten quickly after the test is taken) and the misguided and dangerous belief that there is only one correct answer to a question.  Our obsession with fact-recall-as-intelligence comes to a spectacular climax with the game show, where people are worshipped by canned applause and our own edge-of-the-cushion participation in our living rooms for their (seemingly) incredible memories.

In addition to this alleged disregard for facts, it seems those within proximity of my generation are also at risk for narcissim, in an age where “nobody has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them.”  Mix in spending time online, and this, apparently, condemns us to “juvenile mental habits.”  If choosing not to relinquish my news options to corporate giants, supplementing the book I’m reading with periodic visits to Wikipedia for concepts and people I am unfamiliar with, and keeping in contact with friends all over the world who are doing deeply interesting things is considered “juvenile,” then, excuse me, I’d rather not grow up.

Kevin Kelly posted brief a response to this kind of argument over at his website (Newsweek has another one here).  Though short, he draws attention to the importance of considering the entire media environment we live in.  Is it that we are becoming less intelligent, or is it that our environment (of which my generation seems more acutely aware of) is asking things of us that older models aren’t quite equipped to handle?  Newsweek points out the obvious fact that correlation doesn’t imply causation, and that a  generation’s “loss” of factual knowledge doesn’t necessarily entail digital media as the culprit. The value in investigating how the new media environment is affecting us lies in asking good, relevant questions.  What do we mean by “knowledge” and “intelligence”?  I read a fantastic quote by Clifford Geertz recently in his book The Interpretation of Cultures where he discusses what exactly an anthropologist is/does.  He writes, “[the anthropologist] confronts ‘those big words that make us all afraid’ in contexts obscure enough to take the capital letters off of them.”  It will help to step outside of our current assumptions about media and the environments they create to see what it is we think is going on.  If, as Kelly mentions, it benefits us to ‘plug-in’ and use Google to augment our intelligence, if only temporarily, then so be it.

Maybe today we should modify our teaching in ways that emphasize not how to merely memorize and recall facts, but how to go about finding and evaluating information in the most effective way possible (Howard Rheingold sent out a message over Twitter a while back suggesting maybe we should teach students how to ask Google good questions, a great idea if you ask me).  And not only that, maybe we should follow Kevin Kelly’s sage advice and realize, in light of this new media environment, that no one is as smart as everyone.  A realistic (and indeed, proactive) approach would be to recognize that the new media (or any media for that matter) aren’t one way conduits affecting us but that we also are affecting them in a continuous “system of practice.”  The more we participate on the Web, the smarter it gets.  If you don’t believe me, check out Blaise Aguera y Arcas demo Photosynth at TED.

Lest I bore you to death (because we all know the digital age has atrophied your patience), I will stop here.  What do you think?  Is the “digital age” making young people stupid?

Oh, and my brother wants me to give him a shout out on my blog, so: /shoutout.

Tagged: education, generation y, intelligence, internet, media, technology