Read The Dumbest Generation Online
Authors: Mark Bauerlein
The Dumbest Generation (15 page)
That was the argument behind the declaration, and with so many techno-marvels inside, one could understand a 15-year-old absorbing the slogan as patently true. While everything else inside the store looked positive and pluralistic, with books in the picture the marketing turned aggressive and territorial. Apple set up an explicit antagonism, not books and computers, but books vs. computers, and it backed it up with a blooming, buzzing profusion of electronic gifts on sale inside. It even provided pictures of the very books that the ebook eclipsed. When I showed my wife the display (and had her snap a photograph of it), she proposed, “Maybe when they say ‘the only books’ they mean to include the books in the picture, too.” "C’mon,” I replied. “Maybe the people inside are just kidding,” she suggested. In fact, though, Apple had erected similar displays all across the country as part of a national marketing campaign to reach college students during back-to-school time. Culture critic Virginia Postrel termed it “The Apple Store’s Campaign Against Books,” and provided a picture of another store window just like this one. “Just in case there are any students who still read books,” she commented, “the Apple Store wants them to know that paper technology is obsolete. After all, if it’s not online, it’s not important. Right?” Indeed, Apple didn’t have any of those books for sale inside, and it certainly wasn’t telling customers to leave Apple once they made a purchase and head 100 feet away to Barnes & Noble. For the average teenager looking for the latest in iTunes, the titles in the pictures meant nothing, and the display assured them that they do, indeed, mean nothing.
We should recognize the consumer reality at work here. In our varied and prosperous society, we assume that more choices mean more freedom and pleasure, and that newer, better technology provides more leisure time and spending money. Wealth generates wealth, and the advent of one consumer pleasure doesn’t necessitate the loss of another. In this case, though, the things sought—young people’s time and money—are finite. It’s a zero-sum game. The dollars they spend on books are not spent on
QuickTime7.
The minutes they spend reading books are not spent playing
Vortex.
The more digital matter fills young people’s bedrooms and hours, the less will books touch their lives, for you can’t multitask with
The Sound and the Fury
or with
King Lear.
Most of the time, the marketing of one commodity doesn’t include the denigration of another, unrelated commodity. A commercial for one car rental firm might dramatize the disastrous things that happen if you choose another rental firm, but it won’t contrast car rentals to hiking in the park. The Apple display does just that, promoting one activity and negating another.
QuickTime7.
The minutes they spend reading books are not spent playing
Vortex.
The more digital matter fills young people’s bedrooms and hours, the less will books touch their lives, for you can’t multitask with
The Sound and the Fury
or with
King Lear.
Most of the time, the marketing of one commodity doesn’t include the denigration of another, unrelated commodity. A commercial for one car rental firm might dramatize the disastrous things that happen if you choose another rental firm, but it won’t contrast car rentals to hiking in the park. The Apple display does just that, promoting one activity and negating another.
This is to say that the Apple strategy amounts to more than just a marketing ploy, chasing market share in a limited environment. It advocates. To replace the book with the screen is to remove a 2,500-year -old cornerstone of civilization and insert an altogether dissimilar building block. The enthusiasts of digital learning maintain that screen-influenced brains possess qualitatively different mentalities than book-influenced brains, and so we must conclude that the ebook and all the rest will spawn other knowledges and altered communications. In 50 years, as Boomers and X-ers pass away, digital natives grow up, and technology proceeds apace, civilization will look different. Knowledge will reside less in the minds of people and more on the pages of Web sites. The past will come alive on the screen, not in the imagination. The factual inventory that makes for a good
Jeopardy!
contestant will belong to individuals who tap quickly into the right information sources, not to individuals with the best memories and discipline. Texts will be more visual, reading more “browsy” and skimming.
Jeopardy!
contestant will belong to individuals who tap quickly into the right information sources, not to individuals with the best memories and discipline. Texts will be more visual, reading more “browsy” and skimming.
These are suppositions about an all-digital world, and I don’t know whether they will pan out or not. Most of the discourse about digital learning doesn’t make book reading sound so obsolete. An October 2006 report by the Federation of American Scientists urges the integration of video games into the classroom specifically as a way to improve workplace readiness. “When individuals play modern video and computer games,” it observes, “they experience environments in which they often must master the kinds of higher-order thinking and decision-making skills employers seek today.” Such credulous tributes to the benefits of video games pop up throughout the document, but the only charges against books emerge in comments about state bureaucracies and their habits of textbook adoption. A November 2006 story in the
Miami Herald
covers a fifth-grade Florida classroom for one reason: it’s “paperless.” There, “Web sites are used in lieu of textbooks, PowerPoint Presentations substitute for written essays and students get homework help from their teacher over e-mail.” But the worst thing it says about books is that they don’t excite the kids as much as screens do. Added to that, without this classroom, the teacher maintains, many students have no access to a computer, and hence “don’t have a chance at the American Dream.” Such versions envision digital learning more as an augmentation of the old-fashioned way, not a termination of it (see Deluzuriaga).
Miami Herald
covers a fifth-grade Florida classroom for one reason: it’s “paperless.” There, “Web sites are used in lieu of textbooks, PowerPoint Presentations substitute for written essays and students get homework help from their teacher over e-mail.” But the worst thing it says about books is that they don’t excite the kids as much as screens do. Added to that, without this classroom, the teacher maintains, many students have no access to a computer, and hence “don’t have a chance at the American Dream.” Such versions envision digital learning more as an augmentation of the old-fashioned way, not a termination of it (see Deluzuriaga).
Still, the predictions for digital behavior sometimes reach apocalyptic tones, and with books spoken of in the customary “reading is fundamental” terms, they appear to the 15-year-old, already recalcitrant and overstimulated, as ever more inferior and unnecessary. The inventor of the computer mouse, Douglas Englebart, once declared that “the digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,” and the Associations of Elementary and of Secondary School Principals thought enough of his opinion to lead with it in a large ad in
Education Week
proclaiming, “We Can’t Leave Our Students Behind in the Digital Revolution.” Jon Katz of
Wired
magazine heralded in a celebrated article from 1997 that “the digital young are revolutionaries. Unlike the clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they’re making one.” The article had a momentous title, “Birth of a Digital Nation,” and with fulminations about how the digital young are “bright,” “challenge authority,” and “take no one’s word for anything,” it played straight to the adolescent hubris that links youth to technology to genius to the future. Teens and 20-year-olds love their blogs and games, they carry the iPod around like a security blanket, and now they have a discourse to justify shirking the books and playing/watching longer. The youngsters’ either/or actions explode the sanguine visions of hypersmart 18-year -olds reading books while they multitask with other diversions. More and more, they don’t read books or newspapers, and their choices ensure the screen society to come. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Digital visionaries foresee a future of screens everywhere and books as collector’s items, and digital natives act on the vision in the present, dropping books and going online, making the prediction come true.
Education Week
proclaiming, “We Can’t Leave Our Students Behind in the Digital Revolution.” Jon Katz of
Wired
magazine heralded in a celebrated article from 1997 that “the digital young are revolutionaries. Unlike the clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they’re making one.” The article had a momentous title, “Birth of a Digital Nation,” and with fulminations about how the digital young are “bright,” “challenge authority,” and “take no one’s word for anything,” it played straight to the adolescent hubris that links youth to technology to genius to the future. Teens and 20-year-olds love their blogs and games, they carry the iPod around like a security blanket, and now they have a discourse to justify shirking the books and playing/watching longer. The youngsters’ either/or actions explode the sanguine visions of hypersmart 18-year -olds reading books while they multitask with other diversions. More and more, they don’t read books or newspapers, and their choices ensure the screen society to come. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Digital visionaries foresee a future of screens everywhere and books as collector’s items, and digital natives act on the vision in the present, dropping books and going online, making the prediction come true.
To anyone who regrets the trend, digital enthusiasts have a ready rejoinder. The screen, they say, incorporates all the things book reading entails, and supplies so much more. Interactive screen practices may differ qualitatively from book reading, but users can always gear down to reading page by page in PDF format. Thousands of books and old essays go online every day, and e-books will soon match the old reading experience when they grow as light and sturdy and vision -friendly as a dog-eared, four-ounce paperback that slides into a back pocket.
More important, they argue, the screen actually encourages more reading and writing, more inquiry and activism, more decision-making, as Johnson would say. The interactivity of the digital screen solicits opinions and judgments, and follows with feedback. You read and you write, listen and speak out, plan and predict, watch a video and share one of your own. Will Richardson, author of
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,
calls it the “Read/Write Web,” and maintains that it “is changing our relationship to technology and rewriting the age old paradigms of how things work.” A half century ago, Ray Bradbury envisioned screen entertainment as an enervating drug, portraying Montag’s wife in
Fahrenheit 451
(1953) as a reality/interactive TV junkie who’s lost her social consciousness and her capacity to love. She spends her days in her room, which has television screens covering three walls. Her favorite show,
The Family,
includes her in the plot, and the characters sometimes turn to address her directly—a hypnotically meaningful thing for her. Thirty years later, in
Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985), Neil Postman claimed that television’s omnivorous eye turned every event and experience into entertainment, the moral meaning of joy, pain, defeat, and justice subordinated to their showtime potential. Postman contrasted George Orwell’s
1984
nightmare, in which totalitarian power is imposed from without, to Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World,
in which people enjoy so many mechanisms of pleasure that they “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” Bradbury and Postman form high points in a tradition of media commentary that claims the screen “atomizes” individuals, isolating and pacifying them while purveying illusions of worldly contact.
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,
calls it the “Read/Write Web,” and maintains that it “is changing our relationship to technology and rewriting the age old paradigms of how things work.” A half century ago, Ray Bradbury envisioned screen entertainment as an enervating drug, portraying Montag’s wife in
Fahrenheit 451
(1953) as a reality/interactive TV junkie who’s lost her social consciousness and her capacity to love. She spends her days in her room, which has television screens covering three walls. Her favorite show,
The Family,
includes her in the plot, and the characters sometimes turn to address her directly—a hypnotically meaningful thing for her. Thirty years later, in
Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985), Neil Postman claimed that television’s omnivorous eye turned every event and experience into entertainment, the moral meaning of joy, pain, defeat, and justice subordinated to their showtime potential. Postman contrasted George Orwell’s
1984
nightmare, in which totalitarian power is imposed from without, to Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World,
in which people enjoy so many mechanisms of pleasure that they “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” Bradbury and Postman form high points in a tradition of media commentary that claims the screen “atomizes” individuals, isolating and pacifying them while purveying illusions of worldly contact.
Richardson finds the opposite process at work, users ascending from couch-potato quietude to community and collaboration. “We are no longer limited to being independent readers or consumers of information; as we’ll see,” he announces, “we can be collaborators in the creation of large storehouses of information. In the process, we can learn much about ourselves and our world.” Knowledge flows in both directions, from scattered but connected users to a central, evolving site/forum, and then back again to users, with comments and corrections attached. The process gives birth every month to thousands of junior reporters and editors, amateur filmmakers and photographers, local muckrakers, consumer advocates, and social trendsetters. They post comments, reveal secrets, criticize news stories (the Dan Rather affair), record historic events as they unfold (the 2004 tsunami), and initiate colloquies on school, music, bullying, elections, and games. A January 2006 BBC News story on “The Year of the Digital Citizen” reviewed the new gadgets and practices of the preceding year and pronounced, “what 2005 proved was that far from these techno tools being purely dumb funnels for the same paid-for content from mainstream media, they had the chance to become powerful tools for political expression and reportage” (see Twist). The old system of politics, journalism, and entertainment kept entry passes to a minimum, allowing only a precious few musicians into the recording studio, only certified reporters into the room. Technology has broken the grip of Big Media, producing an army of watchdog citizens and opening the gates to creative expression to individuals far from Hollywood and Manhattan. And amid all the tasteless images, bad grammar, and puerile showmanship appear marginalized voices and important testimonials. Out of the mass of content creators will come the next Mamet, the next Soderbergh.
This is why
Time
magazine named “You” the Person of the Year for 2006. Lev Grossman explained the choice:
Time
magazine named “You” the Person of the Year for 2006. Lev Grossman explained the choice:
But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.
Again, a “revolution.” A related
Time
piece calls it “the New Digital Democracy,” and even though a few other articles worry about, for instance, the dangers of Web collectivism and how cell phones have encouraged a dispersed surveillance system, overall
Time
’s year-end summary depicts a positive historical transformation under way. The most intense and seasoned actors in the drama, the rising digital generation, experience it as a personal change—a new game to play, screen to watch, message to send—but their choices in sum alter the general social habitation in America. A democratic empowerment spreads, and more and more commentators and journalists far from hi-tech circles commend it.
Time
piece calls it “the New Digital Democracy,” and even though a few other articles worry about, for instance, the dangers of Web collectivism and how cell phones have encouraged a dispersed surveillance system, overall
Time
’s year-end summary depicts a positive historical transformation under way. The most intense and seasoned actors in the drama, the rising digital generation, experience it as a personal change—a new game to play, screen to watch, message to send—but their choices in sum alter the general social habitation in America. A democratic empowerment spreads, and more and more commentators and journalists far from hi-tech circles commend it.
Young people absorb the fervor inside their classrooms and at home alone. Not only does it license them to tinker with e-tools as a proper mode of study, solidifying the so-called “
Sesame Street
effect” (if learning isn’t fun, it isn’t any good). It also provides an aggrandized sense of their own activity, their own voice. Here’s a fifth-grade student quoted in an article on blogs in the classroom in
EDUCAUSE Review
(2004):
Sesame Street
effect” (if learning isn’t fun, it isn’t any good). It also provides an aggrandized sense of their own activity, their own voice. Here’s a fifth-grade student quoted in an article on blogs in the classroom in
EDUCAUSE Review
(2004):
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