A Digital Dumbing Down?

Is the new media environment making us dumber or just different? It seems everyone is weighing in on the question these days, whether in books lamenting The Dumbest Generation and The Age of American Unreason or in articles asking whether the Internet is making us stupid or at least hastening the twilight of book reading.

Not all observers are angst-ridden. Recently New York Times columnist David Brooks dryly observed that "on or about June 29, 2007," the release date of the first iPhone, media displaced culture, and "the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement." But Brooks seemed more bemused than alarmed by the fact that what he calls "aggregators and appraisers" and other "lords of the memes" are the new cultural elite.

U.S. News went to several scholars and specialists for their thoughts on the effects of the digital and other new media on the minds and culture of the under-30 generation. Edited remarks:

Maryanne Wolf, the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, is the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.
One of my big questions is, "Who is minding the cognitive store?" It's part of that larger question, "Who's really in charge of what and how we access knowledge?" I have always thought of the Internet and other media as tools that we had some kind of control over, but what I'm worried about is that they have almost become the content instead of the tool. The book and the printing press were tools that we used, but the new media seem to be more in charge than we are, and I'm particularly worried about what we consider the intellectual content of what we have access to.

I am neither a techno-utopian nor a Luddite. My most important question is what the future is for the next generation. My brain and your brain are interesting to me, but we are fairly well formed in our intellectual capacities. I don't think that's the same for the young. I want to be sure that we are preserving our ability to control what we think and how we think for that next generation who have not had that same independent mind-set toward probing underneath the text that we have. My hope for them is that they are not going to accept the surface of what they Google or whatever they're doing with whatever media, that they are really going to be thinking beyond and beneath what they are given as the first three "hits." This is an important point that I think Nick Carr [in his Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"] makes much better than I do. The information we are getting access to is prioritized by popularity rather than by content. So that's where the medium itself is controlling the content.

Socrates [in his attack on the rise of the written word in Plato's Phaedrus] said that youth can be deluded by the seeming permanence of print to believe that they have found truth when they have only barely begun to probe for it. He was saying that all of us, and particularly youth, are vulnerable to thinking that what is in front of us is enough. In the last chapter of my book, I say that I watch my own children in horror after they write an essay, and I say, "What do you think?" and they say, "Oh, I know it all. I Googled it." Again, it's the same phenomenon of the seeming permanence of this information source that deludes the child or adolescent or even the adult into thinking that they have the truth. That makes us more into the superficial decoders of information—the Socratic nightmare—not real probers and internalizers of information.

One thing the recent National Endowment for the Arts study "To Read or Not to Read" says that is particularly worrisome to me is that you see these kids who at around age 9 are decoding—the first part of the reading process—better than ever before. But by the time they're in middle school or high school, particularly by 12th grade, you look at their inferential processes, their comprehension processes, and you find that they're flat or declining. We have only correlational data now. We can't say, "That's because kids are spending every spare minute not reading books." That kind of evidence is interesting but not the kind we can derive causality from yet. We need to do studies of children who have different immersions in digital media and look at brain imaging. Then you'd have behavioral measures of comprehension but also be able to see, or not see, whether they are literally reading in a different way and thinking about what they read using a different array of processes.

But that's only one half of me. The other half is thrilled that never before has physics been able to be taught in these three-dimensional ways and that we have access to knowledge that is extraordinary. So my hope is that we learn to use all this in better ways. The genie is out of the bottle. We can't and shouldn't turn back, but we should exert a more thoughtful, deliberate approach to knowledge so that at the end wisdom itself is not out the door. If we're talking about Socrates, we're talking about a relationship to knowledge, virtue, and wisdom. And those constants are part and parcel of what a deliberating society must have in its sights when it looks at how its children access knowledge.

James O'Donnell, a classicist and the provost of Georgetown University, is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace and the forthcoming The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History.
I was just talking to a young man who graduated from Georgetown and completed his first year at Harvard Law School last year, and I asked him what he had done this summer, and he answered, "Well, I was just working in Delhi all summer." I said let's slow down and ask when "just" would have been the right word to put in that sentence, as opposed to some form of, "I made this mighty pilgrimage halfway around the world; it was astonishing; I have to tell you about it." But instead he blithely goes off working on a project to help found a new law school in suburban Delhi with international faculty and so forth.

Chances are he didn't have a lot of time to put up his feet this summer and read Proust, and I am capable of regretting that. If I ask a question about intelligence and applied intelligence, it seems to me that I can find a great many measures of extraordinary success and functional achievement in the young people at Georgetown. So that's No. 1.

No.2 and No. 3 are the "howevers." The howevers are that the assiduous study of the written word and participation in the culture of the written word is undoubtedly under challenge, and I think we are a long way from being able to theorize and understand what a movement away from the normative culture of the written word will do to a society. You can get arguments that it is a culture that has made possible or facilitated the creation of relatively objective forms of knowledge, of practices of analysis, interpretation, and logic that are things of beauty on which we depend every day. At the same time, one needs to recognize that the written word, in the form that we know it, is a technology invented to achieve certain goals. It had its limitations as well as it strengths, and when it is competed with by other technologies that can do things never thought possible, it will necessarily move to a different place in the cultural organon.

My other "however" is the scientific and technical part of education. We can worry about the dumbing down of people who don't read Proust, but I worry at least as much about the people who don't need to study math or science in high school or university because somebody else will do that and I'd rather be a consultant at McKinsey where I don't actually have to know that stuff.

Both of these are sources of concern, and I think in both cases, we don't fully understand what the possibilities of the new are to match with the certain strengths that came to us from the old. A part of my book Avatars of the Word came about because in my electronic zeal of 15 years ago [when O'Donnell was vice provost for information systems and computing at the University of Pennsylvania], I said what I ought to do is go back and find the poor benighted people of the 15th and 16th centuries who were skeptical about print and show what silly fools they were as a way of showing what silly fools people are to worry about stuff now. What I found is that there were a fair number of people who had concerns and reservations about using the newfangled print technology. When you looked at their objections, they all made perfect sense. They were all smart and logical. We now don't see that because the thing they could not imagine in 1500 or 1550 was the sheer size, scale, and speed of communication that the new technology would bring about—size in particular, because humans are very bad at conceiving large quantities of anything. (That's why they have trouble understanding evolution; they can't imagine what a million years is like.) So, yes, there were costs brought to the face-to-face meditative community of the monastery in which people spent their whole lives meditating upon God's word, and monasteries probably haven't done as well in some respects in 1500 to 2000 as they did in 1000 to 1500. But the subset of monasteries called universities actually have had a pretty good run in the latter period. What the social forms are, what the practices are that will turn out to be functional—I don't think we are very good at imagining at this point.

That young man who was in to see me—I was encouraging him in his course for a while, but then I pulled back and said, "You realize, I haven't been saying to you that I hope you go back to Harvard and study real hard and get good grades in your courses." I was taking that for granted. We were talking instead about his Delhi experience and what he might do next summer working in some other nonprofit sector to get to the point where he might be able to do even more remarkable things. And I don't doubt that he will.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and worked as director of research and analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.
I would single out the decline of leisure reading as the single most disturbing development. And the reason I would single that out is that it is often underappreciated in the education world. Educators are so fixated on the classroom, on the curriculum, on teachers that I think they underestimate the importance in the past of those leisure activities that complement academic performance. And I'm not talking about reading Moby Dick. I'm talking about reading books like Conan books for boys—any leisure reading that is sustained, that requires concentration beyond a few minutes, and that requires a level of vocabulary acquisition. That is a serious activity, and there we've seen a big drop in the last few years. And I'll add that the reading of text messages, personal profile pages, and blog posts are not nearly an adequate substitute for book reading or the longer newspaper and magazine reading.

Another disturbing sign is the declining attitude—not knowledge here, but attitude—toward historical knowledge. This comes about with the ready availability of historical knowledge online that makes young people think that the memory of the past, the works of the dead, the thoughts and ideas of faraway times and places aren't really something that need to be internalized. They don't need to take those materials as part of their character, their values, their beliefs. It's all just out there as information. It's the conversion of the materials of history into nothing but bits of information. Paradoxically, the ease in obtaining that information makes it so they don't have to take it in as part of themselves.

I am possibly more alarmed about the digital culture than others because I set my alarm in the context of the general discussion of technology and education in this country. And what I see is so much money and momentum behind digitalizing education wherever we can, whenever we can, that we need stronger oppositional voices, stronger skepticism. The enthusiasm expressed in things like the MacArthur Foundation's [$50 million] Digital Media and Learning Initiative and the amount of money that futurists and game theorists receive for their speeches and consultations make it so that it's like a tidal wave. One reason I take a strong position is that I recognize that this is a genuine contest taking place between education and the status of knowledge formation and verbal skills in the classroom. I see technology—without much hardier circumspection about it—as trouble.