Whoa whoa whoa…. dunces?
The Argument
A week or two ago, author Susan Jacoby wrote an opinion essay in The Washington Post called: “The Dumbing of America.” The tagline for her article: “Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces.”
Jaconby introduces her three-part argument:
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
She goes on to flesh out her argument by discussing how video (and all other “digital media”) reinforces the continuous shrinking of our attention spans and the general disintegration of our reasoning and intellect. Indeed, she segues into what she observes to be an ”erosion of general knowledge” among Americans. She reports that
nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”
One can’t help but point to the unfortunate episode from the Ms. Teen South Carolina pageant as an illustration of Jacoby’s point.
Finally, she concludes that Americans are comfortable with their lack of intellectual drive. She sees this as “a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism.”
My Take
Jacoby makes some good points in her column. Arguably, people are reading less. We rely more and more on gadgets and the web to be our second brains. Americans do exhibit a certain ignorance about the rest of the world and what happens in it. And I can personally attest to a shortened attention span. But I disagree with the foundation of her argument, the smugness with which she delivers it, and her general lack of ideas for solving the problem she has highlighted.
First, she draws a shaky causal relationship between what she sees as the “dumbing of America” and the rise of digitial media. She posits that the past twenty-five years that saw a decline in reading among youth ”encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.” Yes the two time frames coincide and show correlation… but is it really cause-and-effect at play here? I have no evidence otherwise, but she has weak evidence in favor of it.
She simply responds with “balderdash” to an argument made by Steven Johnson in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter – that toddlers are focusing, rather than wasting, their minds when they watch video. She admits that she can’t prove that reading books is any better than surfing the web as far as educating citizens and enriching their lives, but that it simply “seems to her” that that’s the case.
Again, I don’t deny that her argument might have some merit. She does cite many studies and statistics to demonstrate the “dumbing of America.” But she makes an intellectual blunder herself in hypothesizing and running with a causal link between that trend and the rise of digital media. I’m all for finding the malady behind anti-intellectualism, but let’s not just open up the guns on the easiest target just because she prefers encyclopedias to Wikipedia.
Speaking of Wikipedia, founder Jimmy Wales wrote a response to Jacoby’s column which you can read here. The money quote:
Students write to me in volumes I can only hope to respond to, reporting on their own personal experiences and breakthroughs. These are not people whose use of the Internet has resulted in an “inability to concentrate for long periods of time;” as Jacoby says. I hear from students who have spent hours reading and learning from Wikipedia entries just for the sake of general knowledge. Better still, I hear about collaborative campus parties devoted to making thousands of quality improvements to young articles in one night — or uploading gigabytes of public domain source material.
Digital media doesn’t automatically erode intellectualism. Take this blog: we strive here at Tropophilia to highlight some of the biggest debates in the world today. We talk about technology, privacy, the enviroment, energy, and politics. People have engaged in discussions in the comment threads that never could have occured in real life because distance, cost, and time barriers. I can link to supporting materials and images in a way that is expontentially more useful than footnotes in a scholarly journal or a bibliography at the back of a history book. Sure there’s a whole lot of crap out there in the tubes, but there’s a whole lot of fresh water too.
This is Jacoby’s closing paragraph:
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (”Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
OK. So we need to have a conversation? Would you like to lead it, Ms. Jacoby? You just called America a nation of arrogant dunces. Good start. We do need a conversation about this, but you can’t cure arrogance with arrogance. So, please, wipe that smirk off your face and let’s talk about how to make digitial media and intellectualism not only coexist, but reinforce each other.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user ChrisL_AK.
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March 5 2008 at 3:10 pm |
It seems that Jacoby’s “rise of dumbness claim” is chiefly supported by her assertion that “general knowledge,” such as the names of other countries, is “eroding.” But where’s the data? Sure we may not know those countries now, but who said we ever did? Most Americans probably didn’t know half the countries in the South Pacific until they were occupied by Japan in the 1940’s; at any time in our past, when has the knowledge that she refers to been “general?”
Is it possible that the feared rise of ignorance in America is actually a rise in awareness of that ignorance, rather than people actually knowing less about the world with each subsequent generation?
March 5 2008 at 5:17 pm |
Jarred, Jacoby doesn’t simply dismiss Johnson’s point about toddlers. She uses an empirical claim to counter it–namely, “In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.”
Bruce makes a good point about the ignorance of prior generations, but I largely agree with Jacoby about the detrimental effect of an emphasis on digital and video media. I think Jacoby would have been better served emphasizing reflection rather than concentration as the chief virtue of absorbing books, magazines, and other print media. When you buy or pick up a book, the experience forces you to step back and situate its content in relation to your life and sense of self. That book, unique among the tens of thousands at Borders or Barnes and Noble, will be your companion for the next few hours. The sheer quantity of digital or video media a person consumes in a given day, on the other hand, is so diffuse in its breadth and perspective that zeroing in on specifics is difficult. In a one hour period, you may read twenty different blog posts on twenty different subjects. How much can any of us really expect to retain?
To be clear, I am not saying there is anything inherent in digital or video media that makes us dilettantes. If we really wanted to, all of us could spend hours contemplating what we encounter online. But these media incentivize quick, rapid consumption; understandably, people want to sample the buffet line in full, and that may simply mean only grabbing a few bites of each dish.
Another trend Jacoby could have identified as worrisome is the tendency for people to specialize at the expense of well-roundedness. ISI gave college seniors a simple test of civic literacy, and the results are pretty dismal.
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/
The test itself, as you will see, is far from perfect in what it tests for, but it’s hard to think of a good reason for no college to earn better than a D+.
College used to be about making yourself a better person, but it is now largely a way for society to certify that individuals are ready to be employed. So while people may be more well-trained for their careers than ever before, they have become only marginally better equipped to function as capable citizens because the traits needed to be a good citizen–a sense of history, critical thinking, an ability to discern good arguments from bad, and most importantly, a commitment to your community–will largely be a function of a person’s values, and values are one thing colleges have largely forfeited as a luxury as more and more students have gone on to higher education.
March 5 2008 at 9:39 pm |
@Ashish: You’re absolutely right, she does give that empirical basis for that argument. I was originally going to mention that, but had difficulty working it neatly (in the grammatical sense) into my sentence, and so I just skipped it and was going to work on it later. Obviously in my proofreading I forgot about that. Jacoby would probably point to my short attention span as the cause of my error. Whatever it was, my apologies.
That said, I don’t find that example very convincing. OK, toddlers recognize six to eight fewer words for every hour of video watched. That’s a valid concern… but does that mean they’re generally learning or mentally maturing at a slower rate? I know vocabulary is strongly correlated with intelligence… but who’s to say that those toddlers watching videos aren’t making other important connections and advances in their tiny minds, connections and advances that are not measurable… or that are measurable but so far have gone unstudied? Maybe the video watching makes them better observers, or gives them a better eye and ear for motion and sound. Jacoby is quick to point out the cons of digital media without a single acknowledgement of their potential benefits. I’m not saying toddlers should never read, and hopefully Jacoby is not saying that they should never pull their heads out of books, either. There is room for balance, but I don’t see Jacoby searching for it.
The argument that you and Jacoby seem to make (correct me if I’m wrong) is that because of the flood of bite-size information that digital media provide, people are missing out on the richness available in books and other long-form writing because of the incentive to consume information quickly and move on to the next topic. They lose the ability — or at least the inclination — to sit down and situate the material they read in the world around them and in their own lives. I can see your point. I’ve just started reading novels for pleasure after a long, long hiatus and I am amazed at what I’ve been missing.
But isn’t there also richness in variety, immediacy, and brevity? Isn’t there value in being able to read about twenty different subjects in twenty minutes? You asked how much we can retain from this mode of information consumption. I retain a lot. A lot of it is trivial, sure, and doesn’t hold a candle to the ideas contained in novels or other books. But I have learned loads from the blogs I read, and they have and are leading me to explore new ideas, new problems, and even new career possibilities. Instead of digesting and reflecting on it on the spot, as I might with a book, I filter out what I want to reflect on and then think about it when I am I ready to do so: on the way home from work, on the blog, while eating lunch, etc. The brevity of the information nugget offered allows me to process it in similarly nugget-sized chunks of time. On my own schedule, I can place it in my world and in my life. Again, there is room for balance between books and blogs, but I don’t see Jacoby acknowledging it. Instead, she implies that anything other than books and the classic way of learning and digesting information makes us stupid “dunces.”
I’ll be the first to admit that I do not find myself balancing the two very well. I read my news exclusively online. The only magazine I read in print these days is Wired. I’ve read maybe four or five books outside of class since graduating from high school, yet I subscribe to almost 100 blogs. I am definitely not the best case scenario. But I don’t think rejecting blogs, video, and podcasts is the best case either. Arrogantly rejecting the value of useful new media is as “stupid” as arrogantly embracing it in exclusivity. Ashish, I don’t accuse you or Jacoby of all-out rejecting these media, but I just don’t see it in her argument, and I think that makes her article less than useful.
I definitely agree with your points about college. There is actually a transcript of a chat between Jacoby and Washington Post readers about her article, and she brings that subject up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/02/15/DI2008021502904.html . Here’s hoping that liberal arts education survives and finds it way back into all academic settings in the coming years. It will definitely take a concerted effort.
April 23 2008 at 1:41 pm |
Jacoby on The Colbert Report: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=166772.
April 24 2008 at 1:53 pm |
[...] talked about the future of reading here in the past. But what about the future of writing? Or more specifically, the future of [...]