As someone who spends most of his time on the internet, I found this topic to be a little personal. The article "Is Google Making Us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr talks directly about the internet and what it's doing to our cognitive understanding, but I actually found that article unoffending and enjoyable to read. "America the Illiterate" by Chris Hedges, on the other hand, seemed to dance around the issue – never once saying the word internet – completely offended me on a personal level.
First of all, politics is not decided by the campaigns. The most influential part of an election is who's on what party. Yes, the undecided voters play a part in who wins, but the actual vote a person gives almost always lines up with their political officiation, which is defined by permanently instilled beliefs. The ads may play a part in the election, but it's not going to make Texas a blue state or California a red one.
On the subject of our language supposedly getting lower grade-level, I feel that he's looking at inaccurate statistics. First of all, how do you define a grade-level of reading. The problem is that not only is it an ambiguous line, it also changes over time as language evolves. If the first 8 years of school cover conversational english – just what we need to know to talk to anybody – and the last 4 were on old english that nobody uses anymore, sure Shakespeare's work would be a higher grade-level than modern works, but also the language used in Shakespeare's work is not used conversationally anymore. Knowing Shakespeare's stories is fine, but it's not going to help you convince your friend to invest in your business idea.
Hedges misses the point in his writings, and it infuriates me. It's not that people are getting stupid, it's that you aren't keeping with the times, Hedges. Carr seems to get the point right by not blaming the people, but showing how the medium is changing the status quo. It's not that we're too stupid to read long articles, it's that the internet provides a way to get the facts faster, more engagingly, and provides access to related articles and anything else we'd want quickly. Some people are just afraid of change. Schools have suffered from this, as has the economic market in many ways. I think people need to stop blaming the internet, and starting searching for what makes it new, unique, and better.
Oh, and Micky Mouse is not the most famous figure. In 1990, a study with children found Mario more recognizable than Micky Mouse. At the time the article was written, the most famous figure was most likely Master Chief, and today, over 1 billion views says Psy might be it.
I think you brought up some good points, and I totally agree for the most part. I do believe though that some elections, and especially the more recent ones have not really depended solely on party affiliation. Many republicans found themselves voting democrat because they liked Obama, or strongly disagreed with many of the key ideals Romney fought for, and of course, vice versa. But overall I agree with your thoughts and like the way you questioned his claims and tried, pretty successfully in my mind to, disprove them.
ReplyDeleteI agree that party affiliation isn't completely the decider of an election, especially since most polls put the US at about 1/3 Republican, Deomocratic, and Undecided, but the key here is that most people have stead fast beliefs that they will never go past. I know many people, including myself, who can accurately say, "I will never vote for somebody who believes that we should ____." That's what I believe is what drives the elections, and that's what I was trying to get at in my post.
DeleteLewis- I definitely see where you are coming from with a lot of this. You seem to have a lot of feeling behind this, too. I most certainly agree that the world and the way we think is shifting, largely due to the internet, but it's not necessarily a shift toward stupidity.
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