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August 20, 2008I'm a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, so I seldom have visions. But a year or so ago, while I was in the library of the little university where I teach, something odd happened. At first, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Downstairs, the students were busily at the computer terminals, looking up stuff on Wikipedia or checking their Facebook "wall" or doing whatever it is students do on the library computers. ... Maybe it was the odd silence that engulfed me as I browsed in the stacks, or maybe it was something else, but a moment or two later when I arrived at the shelf where Edmund Wilson's books are kept and reached up for the one I wanted, I was hit by a multiple realization.

First, I was the only person browsing in the stacks. There were lots of people around, but none of them was browsing in the book stacks. I was all alone in the forest of books. Second, it became clear to me why, whenever I looked for a book in the school library, it was almost always there: because the students seldom took out books to read. The collection was pretty much intact. Finally, as I began glancing at the spines of the books on the nearby shelves, which often included the year of their publication, I realized that very few of the books there had been published or purchased in the last 10 years. That's because the library, I immediately understood, had bought very few books in recent years. Obviously, the "acquisitions budget," as it's called, had been diverted to buy the computers.

That's when I had my little vision. The spines of the books, instead of reminding me of trees in a forest, as they often do, suddenly began to look like tombstones. Each date on a book spine recorded the death of a book. I was standing in the middle of The Dead Library. Book readng was over.

Like most visions, my vision of The Dead Library isn't exactly true. There are still book readers, and books are still being borrowed from school libraries. But I notice that Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation, has also noticed this moment of biblio-desolation. "At every university library I've entered in recent years," says Bauerlein, who's a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, "a cheery or intent sophomore sits at each computer station rapping out e-mails in a machine-gun rhythm. Upstairs, the stacks stand deserted and silent," he adds, reassuring me that I'm not just imagining things.

In a front cover book-jacket blurb, the prominent literary scholar Harold Bloom -- who is sort of the Edmund Wilson of the present generation -- rightly calls Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation "an urgent... book on the very dark topic of the virtual end of reading among the young." That's true. But there's more.

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
I don't know: I have never read as much and consulted as many sources than I do today at my computer screen.

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On the other hand, I have to say that the reading I do on my computer is different than the reading I do in books. There's not the same depth of concentration or consideration. I don't struggle with the text in the same way. The internet is good for things like instruction manuals, news, novels, and some not very demanding academic areas I'm not going to name But if I want to read something complex and give it full consideration, I buy a book or print it.

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I don't know: I have never read as much and consulted as many sources than I do today at my computer screen.

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BTW, did you read the review?

I like this ...

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Tyee readers often say that they get it, but then go on to ask that famous political question, "What is to be done?"

Bauerlein doesn't attempt to discuss any solutions, apart from a few hand-waving gestures ... perhaps the most we can hope for is Obama.

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I wonder if he waved his hand in gesture when he wrote that. He almost had me too.

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
Anyone who thinks that Harold Bloom is anything to 'this generation' is operating a few decades out of date.

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True. But beside the point.

From the review

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Not only is this a shabby intellectual account, it also thoroughly vitiates a lot of the hard work Bauerlein has done in empirically demonstrating the decline of reading and knowledge. It isn't at all clear why Bauerlein doesn't blame the obvious culprits: the present-day manufacturers and advertisers of devices and especially trivial content who relentlessly push their wares upon young customers, and convince them that it's cool.

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Bauerlein conveys almost no sense of the market-driven, mindless -- okay, let's say it -- capitalist, cultural context driving the present era.

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Originally posted by RosaL:

I think it's obvious whose interests are served if the great mass of the people no longer read - or read only trivial entertainment.

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Originally posted by RosaL:
True. But besides the point.

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No, it's not besides the point. The point is that the author of the article is out of touch. It's a Luddite response, and not to mention elitist, to hold reading of 'literature' (meaning high art worthy of bourgeois intelligence) higher than the reading of other kinds of writing. As martin said, those who are raised natively in cyberculture will develop different strategies of reading and different ways of thinking consonant with contemporary life. Those who think stodgy old conservatives like Bloom are in any way radical or modern consider literature to be a bastion or custodian of faux humanistic values and pretension.

ETA: I don't agree with Bloom. I doubt the reviewer does either. But my disagreement with Bloom has nothing to do with whether he "is anything" to "this generation" or to any other.

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

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ETA: I don't agree with Bloom. I doubt the reviewer does either. But my disagreement with Bloom has nothing to do with what "this generation" - or any other - thinks of him.

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Reading isn't going anywhere, natch. It's simply evolving.

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Now, we have the same thing happening again. As if reading Dan Brown is more literary than reading Daily Kos. We used to think owning a set of Encyclopedia Britannica was a sign of status. Now, we can read Wikipedia, see how articles develop, are sourced, and broker compromise. The printing press was a tool of democracy, and the Internet is a more radical continuation of that strategy. The problem, as always, is democratizing those tools and resist capitalist incursion onto technological infrastructure.

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To compare online reading to fast food is short sighted, and a slight to anyone who posts seriously on babble, on political blogs or in manifold other places on the web.

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Strongly agree with martin and Catchfire.

Contempt for new technology and for youth are hardly new phenomena. Those who refuse to learn humbly from both are condemned to grow old faster.

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Bauerlein is aware that his pessimistic findings may be dismissed "as yet another curmudgeonly riff. Older people have complained forever about the derelictions of youth, and the 'old fogy' tag puts them on the defensive."

But the 49-year-old Bauerlein insists that the facts are the fact.

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Research is way, WAY easier with the internet, in that pretty much all scholarly journals are online these days (and all university students and employees have access through their school libraries). Probably that has a lot to do with why there are way more students on the computer than in the stacks

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Well, if they were reading an article from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or any of a dozen first-rate magazines and newspapers available online, that might be true. But as Bauerlein documents, that's not what they're reading. They're reading each other's post-it notes on Facebook, and viewing pop star gossip on YouTube (or YouPorn or PornTube). Predictably, the deniers and would-be refuters of Bauerlein's thesis have little to offer beyond bromides about the wonders of technology.

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It's a Luddite response, and not to mention elitist, to hold reading of 'literature' (meaning high art worthy of bourgeois intelligence) higher than the reading of other kinds of writing.

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You might consider looking up who the Luddites were.

I could suggest a couple of titles.

Since when is "high art" something a bourgeois would be interested in? Mass entertainment, including much of the stuff found on the internets, is very bourgeois fare.

I know that when I'm working, I'm often multitasking. I answer e-mails and instant messages as they come in, while I'm reading journal articles or doing work, most of which happens at my computer.

I understand why those of us who grew up offline might be sort of shocked at how much time students spend using social sites like Facebook and IM online. But from what I can tell, students use their e-mail to not only communicate about their social lives, but also to study, to set up meetings for extracurricular activities (which are often related to their studies or campus activism) and to share notes and stuff like that.

Our work e-mail was down for a couple of days recently, and I realized just how much I use it to do EVERYTHING. And I mean everything. All organizing, all planning, all communicating with everyone at work on every project I do, e-mail is central to it. All files get e-mailed instead of printed out and carried to people. Everything is done online, everything. My inbox at work is my to-do list and I use my e-mail client to organize not only my e-mails, but all my projects. And I think most others do too. When our e-mail and internet is down, we're screwed.

So it's understandable that students are also working in that manner.

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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Despite the "information age," the "digital revolution," and all the other slogans about access to knowledge, "young Americans today are no more learned or skilful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date or inquisitive, except in the material of youth culture." The last is a point Bauerlein reiterates throughout his book. What the young are knowledgeable about is confined to their own rather narrow, narcissistic milieu.

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So basically, what he's saying is that nothing has changed. Young adults are as disengaged from politics and world events as they've always been, and now, instead of yakking on the phone for hours a day the way we did when I was a teenager, they chat online for hours a day. And they spend two to four hours a day on tv and video games - yep, that sounds about right from when I was a kid.

The sky is always falling. Yes, the majority of young people are not engaged in politics and world events, just as the majority of young people ALWAYS were not. And then, as they get older, many more will engage, just like they did from my generation. It's just the WAY they engage that will be different. Instead of reading newspapers and watching television news, they'll read online news and blogs. Except that, online, they'll also be able to find people worldwide, with whom they can discuss what they read instantly.

And then they'll have the most powerful organizing tool that's ever been invented which will help them not only find like-minded people very quickly, but will plug them in to any activism or activities they're interested in engaging in.

It's definitely a new world, but that doesn't mean no one is reading anymore. It just means that people are reading differently.

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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but the 49-year-old Bauerlein insists that the facts are the fact.

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It is interesting that the story described a hunt for a work by Edmund Wilson. Not too long ago I tried to find Wilson's most famous work, To the Finland Station, in the public library here. An interlibrary search found a battered copy in the Orillia library.

It is immediatel clear that, of course, anyone seriously looking for the history of collectivist thought leading up to Lenin's arrival, by train, at an entry point into Russia, in 1917, could google it in a moment.

But that is hugely presumptuous, assuming that everyone (who is meaningful?) is capable of that act of digital manipulation. Some might call that elitist, or, at least, not representative of the real world of youth - certainly it doesn't describe the reading mozaic that is the public.

Among youth, of course, there are fewer digital illiterates, but a significant number will not go past the flotsam.

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G.V.: It is immediatel clear that, of course, anyone seriously looking for the history of collectivist thought leading up to Lenin's arrival, by train, at an entry point into Russia, in 1917, could google it in a moment.
But that is hugely presumptuous, assuming that everyone (who is meaningful?) is capable of that act of digital manipulation.

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It's definitely a new world, but that doesn't mean no one is reading anymore. It just means that people are reading differently.

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If anyone had a misspent youth, it was me. Yet, I could always discuss current events, I could always locate any country on a map, even new ones, and, from the time I was 18, throughout my squandered 20s, I never missed a vote and I knew and understood the concept of a ballot.

This isn't a case of old-fogey-ism. This is cultural and it is affecting their parents also.

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They know who the current "American Idol" is, but they've no idea that Nancy Pelosi is the first woman speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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It sure as hell wouldn't have described me as a 20-something scrounging money for beer and a spliff.

[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Isn't it even more presumptuous to assume that something like this is the kind of criterion their work should be measured by? My 17-yr old Gothic niece can do stuff with various software applications that I can't begin to comprehend, much less assess her skills at... but those who can and take her seriously are in awe.
AND - "meaningless" as she is at her age - she manages to grokk Kierkegaard, a thinker she would never have learned about if not for the Web. I don't think much of the mental comfort one obtains from stereotyping the young using now-arcane references and speculating that they can't really know their way around Google.

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Two-thirds of high-school seniors couldn't explain a photo of a theatre whose portal reads 'Coloured Entrance.'"

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Maybe this is good.

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[ 20 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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but I have read this brilliant and startling concern at least 4 times in my life now

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I noticed you started this thread, on Robert Jensen and you say, "this professor of journalism expounds on the increasing acceptance of pornonography into the mainstream and the attendant pornification of pop culture, and its effect of trivializing and disappearing sexual violence."
Hmmmm .....

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:

And in that time, as we progressed from communities and neighbourhoods to enclaves and cocooning; and as we progressed from family dinners to TV dinners to pizza pockets; and as we progressed from local businesses and local jobs complete with schools, post offices, hardware stores, and butchers, to busing, regional shopping nodes, and part-time associate positions; and as we progressed from news to infotainment to celebrity gossip and "expert analysis"; and as we progress to energy depletion, water scarcity, and food security passes to corporate control, are things getting better? What is your honest opinion?

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And your point? Is it that it's OK to smear kids and the Internet because a capitalist sexist racist culture is putting out terabytes of porn culture in every media, including the much-hallowed book world?

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I fail to see what one does with the other.

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'What's the point of loving a God if you don't love the people around you.'

'God hasn't come looking for me, so I'm not going to go looking for him.'

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Originally posted by Bookish Agrarian:
I fail to see the connection between your list and my post, or in the supposed problem of young people are not alright. If you want to explain how this perennial complaint, which I pointed out dates back to at least the 1800s in my personal experience, is responsible for everything from poor nutrition to envrionmental damage I would be fascinated to see it.

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Originally posted by Al-Qa'bong:
Funny how you link the Luddites with the boojwah. Some time around the age of the Luddites came the rise of the bourgeoisie. One could even argue that the bougeoisie created the Luddites. They were enemies, incidentally.

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The humanistic impulse that drives the anti-Internet crowd here may not be wrong, but it is misplaced. The internet is not reducible to itself; it is not 'invented'. Technology cannot be removed from its social moment, and so if technology evokes or expresses a particular social character, it's because that social character preceded the actual technological phenomenon. Print, as I mentioned above, is another technology that 'changed the world' but now we think of it as some kind of romantic custodian of humanistic values. If you blame technology for the ills of society, you are as short-sighted as the Luddites were.

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Originally posted by Catchfire:

Since you seem to know something about the Luddites, you'll know that they were a regressive, nostalgic, reactionary barrier to the bourgeois revolution of production.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
The so-called Luddites were mainly workers whose standard of living was being destroyed by rapacious industrialists and who decided to fight back the only way they knew: by attacking the technology that was being used to impoverish them.

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
But the answer is not to attack technology--because this de-historicizes and de-socializes technology, which is unabstractable.

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Ever read Ann Landers? Every time a reader wrote in to complain about "kids these days," she responded that she'd been hearing the same thing as long as she'd been doing the column.

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[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
Wtf? If you want to start a thread about the nuanced and complex history of the Luddite revolution, go ahead and start one.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
One, the book being reviewed is based on empirical research, I assume.

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Yeah, but research of what? How many kids in their teens and early 20's know who the Speaker of the House is. How many young people can't find Iraq on a map. (How many old North Americans who grew up without the internet can find Iraq on a map? And of those who can, how many of them could when they were a teenager or young adult?) How many vote regularly. Yeah, like every generation ever, young people generally don't vote. The sky is falling.

Newsflash: kids on the whole have never been interested in the same stuff as adults. Young adults have never been interested in the same stuff as older adults. Young people have never been engaged in electoral politics all that much - but you know what? A lot of young people ARE engaged in social movements. And you know how they communicate and organize? Online.

How many 50 year-olds do you know who organize political and social activist events using Facebook event tools? I know tons of young people who do. How many 50 year-olds do you know who can design web sites and blogs? Every other kid has their own web site or blog these days.

How many kids did you know in your senior year of high school (if you grew up in my generation or older) who sat around the cafeteria discussing who they were going to vote for in the next election, and comparing foreign policy positions of the major candidates? I knew maybe one or two kids who did that. And I wasn't one of them.

And yet, somehow I grew up and, by my late 20's, got engaged, and started to learn a lot more about the world and about politics.

I really enjoy my daughter's skills with her computer. Finds amazing things.

But while paddling our canoe last weekend, I discovered that she doesn't read much, outside of her own area of interest. I don't challenge her on it, because it's mostly a self-defence mechanism in a world that - despite all its technical achievements - is going seriously mad.

That "now-arcane" reference to To the Finland Station was occasioned by the appearance of Wilson's name in the article. But one could suggest that anyone discussing politics who has not read that work, is at a disadvantage. And their fulminations tend to show that. No history. No depth.

And martin, this is not to "smear" kids, but your "17-year-old Gothic niece" is reading Kierkegaard because he contributed to a society called "companions of the deathbound", which as any existentialist knows, would have its collective feet solidly on the ground - or under it.

Your brother or sister could have a little talk with their daughter explaining that there are other philosophical schools of thought - all (or none) of which might have become known to her through books, but the process would have more likely required some comparing, rather than turning directly to the thrills of Ms Shelly's creation and its descendants.

Susan Jacoby's book, The Age of AMerican Unreason, and Al Gore's book, The Assault on Reason, make the point about a world leaving reading material behind in favour of television and a learning system without historical background.

I thought, from the beginning, that we were discussing "young" readers, not just the intelectually and financially blessed. And will hold to that thought. Because I think that FM has summed up the collective, societal development very well:
(quote)

And in that time, as we progressed from communities and neighbourhoods to enclaves and cocooning; and as we progressed from family dinners to TV dinners to pizza pockets; and as we progressed from local businesses and local jobs complete with schools, post offices, hardware stores, and butchers, to busing, regional shopping nodes, and part-time associate positions; and as we progressed from news to infotainment to celebrity gossip and "expert analysis"; and as we progress to energy depletion, water scarcity, and food security passes to corporate control, are things getting better? What is your honest opinion?

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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Two-thirds of high-school seniors couldn't explain a photo of a theatre whose portal reads 'Coloured Entrance.'

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I don't enjoy long nonfiction treatises (very few are worth the length) and have often wondered why books can't be 20 or 30 pages long - with an option to buy more chapters if such be the need. Maybe the publishing industry can't handle it. Maybe some authors are too insecure or downright unable to present a thesis in short form and invite readers to go further. Persky's nostalgia about "browsing" in stacks of old books is a sign that he hasn't considered that problem.

No, magazine serialization is not the solution. I'm not buying a magazine (worse still, subscribing) to read one instalment when the rest doesn't interest me. Online availability is the answer, IMO, and distribution and popularization means must be developed to focus on that. If publishers can't make enough money that way, then too bad, resign yourselves to losing money by not selling books.

One more point: Nancy Pelosi? Who gives a steaming f*** about her? She came to power on ugly illusions that a Democratic Congress would end the war. Many of us here ridiculed that notion well in advance (as we now ridicule in advance the notion - to which Persky seems partly hostage - that Obama signifies something or other positive). Well, we all know what happened. Nancy Pelosi is a bit player suckholing G.W. Bush. Why would we care whether U.S. youth know her name?

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As for bourgeois interest in high culture, it is emphatic. Cultural capital, like Milton, Shakespeare, The New Yorker, is essential to the capitalist project that privileges such art above working-class pleasures like hardboiled detective fiction. I know you are a fan of Chandler, so I'm sure you'll agree that the music found in the pages of The Big Sleep is of a quality with any modernist literature. Yet when Chandler was promoted from the pulp of Black Mask to the gloss of The Smart Set, there was all kinds of bourgeois pride mucking about. It's interesting that you don't see the connection between 'high art' and the bourgeoisie. I could suggest a couple of titles...

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I'd be interested in those titles, if it isn't too much trouble.

I don't think the bourgeois mentality appreciates what you call "high art" for its artistic value (a hard thing to quantify), but rather as a commodity to be consumed. Once the art has been digested the consumer can say, "Look at me, I have culture."

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I know you are a fan of Chandler, so I'm sure you'll agree that the music found in the pages of The Big Sleep is of a quality with any modernist literature.

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How could you remember this? I can barely tell anyone apart on these web forums, never mind remembering what each individual says.

Anyway, I don't think Chandler is "of a quality" with modernist literature; he sticks a gat in modernist literature's ribs and blows huge holes in it.

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But please don't tut-tut when our vibrant, healthy, forward-looking, and fundamentally progressive and revolutionary young people don't.

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Sometimes I'm in awe of the attitudes of some of the kids I encounter, and wonder why 30 years ago I couldn't have had my act together like they do.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

Toronto Star columnists Carol Goar worried about it, and Antonia Zerbisias called it a media that "distracts with trivia, just to better the bottom line".

I wondered "If, as an Ipsos-Reid poll found, only 11 per cent of the citizenry aged 18 to 29 could name the leader of the official opposition on the eve of the election, what percentage might be able to say what the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights could mean for the future of women wanting to end their pregnancy, for instance? Who is most likely to benefit from a general ignorance of such details?

When Winston CHurchill observed that democracy was the worst of governing systems, 'except for all the others', he could not have reckoned with a citizenry reduced to this level of understanding. Or did he?

And did only one in five of the twentysomethings in his time bother to vote?

It took a world war to usher in voting rights for women and another to bring some security to the notion of universal democratic rights.

For what?

The'informed citizen' may now be an informed taxpayer (only). For neoconservatism, this was the key to electoral success, first exploited by the late Ronald Reagan."

And this "electoral" concern is the concern of Jacoby and Gore, esoteric concerns about what the bourgeosie are reading, aside.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
I'd be interested in those titles, if it isn't too much trouble.

I don't think the bourgeois mentality appreciates what you call "high art" for its artistic value (a hard thing to quantify), but rather as a commodity to be consumed. Once the art has been digested the consumer can say, "Look at me, I have culture."

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Anyway, it's this kind of dynamic that I see at work in someone who gasps and faints at the lack of kids reading Edmund Wilson. Not to discredit Wilson, whom I haven't read, I think, but anytime you privilege a certain stock of writers over another, you are creating a value system that will necessarily exclude certain portions of the population--be it ethnic groups, working-class groups, women, etc. So when I hear people like Persky or Bauerlein (or Sven Birkerts, or Neil Postman, or E.M. Forster, or...) talk about how technology is taking something from us that we need to recover--well, I wouldn't say I ignore them, but it does make you question their motives and social position.

ETA:

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Originally posted by RosaL:
Almost by definition a social development will affect younger people more than older people. To point out some negative historical developments (consequences of the development of capitalism), then, will likely involve pointing out how younger people are affected. That doesn't make it an "attack on youth"!

But apparently we are liberals and can only say that everything is getting better and better - certainly nothing can be getting worse!

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[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

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Originally posted by RosaL:
To point out some negative historical developments (consequences of the development of capitalism), then, will likely involve pointing out how younger people are affected.

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Example, please?

(The cynic)
You know the literary type with language like "who gives a steaming f*** about her" or the same politician simply "suckholing" to Bush.

The politically correct)
Catchfire:
Anyway, it's this kind of dynamic that I see at work in someone who gasps and faints at the lack of kids reading Edmund Wilson. Not to discredit Wilson, whom I haven't read, I think, but anytime you privilege a certain stock of writers over another, you are creating a value system that will necessarily exclude certain portions of the population--be it ethnic groups, working-class groups, women, etc. So when I hear people like Persky or Bauerlein (or Sven Birkerts, or Neil Postman, or E.M. Forster, or...) talk about how technology is taking something from us that we need to recover--well, I wouldn't say I ignore them, but it does make you question their motives and social position.

George Victor: Obviously degenerates read Wilson (the most famous of America's literary critics in mid-20th Century).

And now, for the third time, the reason why Wilson the degenerate is even mentioned by me:

That "now-arcane" reference to To the Finland Station was occasioned by the appearance of Wilson's name in the article. But one could suggest that anyone discussing politics who has not read that work, is at a disadvantage. And their fulminations tend to show that. No history. No depth. Talk "through their hat".
i.e....the printing press as a "tool of democracy", was actually born in China and helped to promote reaction. In Europe it was the "tool" of the protestant church, and resulted in creation of schools so that the kids could read the bible, and thus also became "tools" of the teachers...

If you spend a couple of years in a Grade Two classroom, you realize the amazing potential for change that exists in our younger generation. But somewhere between Grade two and the age of majority, teachers, parents, friends, significant others (particularly significant through the teen years), the media, technology and events have combined to create concerned individuals, but with nowhere to take their concerns.

Because they've been taught not to trust liberal democracy's institutions with all of their contradictions. So they escape. Do their own thing. Remain a great potential force for good.

Please excuse this aside on children, but the innuendo was becoming hard to take.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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Originally posted by Bookish Agrarian:
Please refrain from putting words in my mouth, it is bad manners if nothing else.

I fail to see the connection between your list and my post, or in the supposed problem of young people are not alright. If you want to explain how this perennial complaint, which I pointed out dates back to at least the 1800s in my personal experience, is responsible for everything from poor nutrition to envrionmental damage I would be fascinated to see it.

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It is rather embarrassing that the reviewer very carefully says that the book is not a case of "the 'old fogy' tag" and yet so many babblers fall into that trap.

We have one babbler who thinks that pop-culture is toxic when it comes to porn but is completely innocent when it comes to the minds of the young who eat the intellectual fast food, heavily dosed with porn, glorified violence, and subservient and traditional sexual roles for women, is perfectly fine otherwise. Why his niece can find a dead white guy on Google.

What pains me in this entire discussion is that we live in a dumbed down society. There are entire classes of people out there who take pride in never having voted and just aren't interested. There are hordes of people who believed and still believe Iraq had weapons of WMD. We need informed and public debates on issues of climate change and public policy.

Many babblers will agree we live in a dumbed down society. But when this is documented for one segment of our culture, everyone pooh-poohs the findings, without being able to counter them.

Because, if so, then what is the value of rabble.ca, protest, activism, or even academia? Why shouldn't we just accept we are a bunch of irredeemable morons, vote Harper, if at all, and turn on American Idol while sucking back Bud hoping for a party of comely lasses to emerge in the living room?

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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We have one babbler who thinks that pop-culture is toxic when it comes to porn but is completely innocent when it comes to the minds of the young who eat the intellectual fast food, heavily dosed with porn, glorified violence, and subservient and traditional sexual roles for women, is perfectly fine otherwise.

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"Narcissistic little creeps"??? I am calling ageism.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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I have never intimated that pop culture was "totally innocent"; my point is that blaming youths and the Internet is taking on the wrong target.

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I don't know: I have never read as much and consulted as many sources than I do today at my computer screen. Perhaps, Bauerlein and Bloom should look over those sophomores' shoulders and check whether it's strictly e-mails and Facebook they are engrossed in... The book's subtitle "Don't trust anyone under 30" is probably indicative of the depth of an analysis that haphazardly smears youths to get at a real problem: the underfunding of libraries. If anything, computers and DVD players have brought more people into libraries than ever before.

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"Narcissistic little creeps"??? I am calling ageism.

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[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

And I defy you to find an age where young people were more interested in politics than they are today. You can't do it.

The cynics among us and the politically correct post-modernists have ensured that youth do not turn out in any number at the polls.
(The cynic)
You know the literary type with language like "who gives a steaming f*** about her" or the same politician simply "suckholing" to Bush.

You're probably not good at irony or sarcasm, eh?

At least you are not still agonizing about someone who has the temerity to read that probably nasty Wilson, whoever he is, but you know what some people will read, and you have to wonder about them, their social standing etc. That was the stuff of gossip columns.

And surely only the unexamined life was not worth living for the fella whose honesty got him wasted. No sign of cynicism there. It was ageism that got him into trouble, some say. Principles.
------------------------------------------------

(quote)
And I defy you to find an age where young people were more interested in politics than they are today. You can't do it.

Hell, if you can point to a decade in the past where the turnout of youth at the polls was lower than the last two times up federally, I'll take it all back.

What you are talking about is a model of Homo sapiens who is infinitely flexible and able to handle any new technology, even from a tender age, and it's all good.

There is certainly "good" in being able to communicate - and learn - from someone on the other side of the Earth.

But I think that Martin's niece is in deep dung if an adult doesn't come along and point out what can happen to the impressionable mind reading Kierkegaard without guidance.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Books can stretch over a few hundred pages, and therefore have the luxury of exploring background information and counterarguments. When people surf the web they typically have several windows open, msn, they click refresh on lots of things et cetera. There was a recent study where it was found some office workers check their email 40 times an hour. How can that not be a distraction which reduces concentration?

quote:

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
And I defy you to find an age where young people were more interested in politics than they are today. You can't do it.

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Such counterarguments are so weak it's ridiculous.

Quantitative information is simply not available to be continuously plotted over extended history, and even if it were there would be many variables.

quote:

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George Victor intoned: "Martin's niece is in deep dung if an adult doesn't come along and point out what can happen to the impressionable mind reading Kierkegaard without guidance."

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quote:

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Originally posted by George Victor:
Hell, if you can point to a decade in the past where the turnout of youth at the polls was lower than the last two times up federally, I'll take it all back.

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You must be old enough to recall that youth under 21 weren't even allowed to vote federally before 1974.

As for the last two elections, explain to me the most obvious and striking platform differences between the largest parties.

The youth of this land are far wiser and less supercilious than your comments in this thread.

I believe you have "moved on" in the sense that you no longer subscribe to the ideas that that work contains.

We've both moved on, then. But pity the folks out there that have no idea where those ideas came from. The kids.

Or doesn't that matter, either, to someone who's been there, and the next generations are just to make it up as they go, so to speak?

I believe the 20 per cent who go to the polls understand what "citizen" means. I'm not sure what virtues you would celebrate, in some political sense, and I've been really curious, lately, to know.

How about it? Elucidate, mate.

-------------------

Oh, and there's three decades between 1974 and the 2004 election. Pick any election year in between to compare youth turnout.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

Right? Read it again. I said what "can" happen. You survived. But it's more a crapshoot now.

quote:

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Originally posted by George Victor:
Oh, and there's three decades between 1974 and the 2004 election. Pick any election year in between to compare youth turnout.

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I don't consider high election turnouts as a positive phenomenon in themselves. As I've already suggested, disengagement from electoral politics may well stem from the disengagement of the political parties from the feelings and concerns of the people; from their hypocrisy; from their cynical abandonment of principle; and so on.

You think low turnout stems from something that the youth are doing differently from before?

Tell me about how the youth voted in 1979, or 1984, or 1988, or three Liberal terms thereafter. What erudition and involvement was displayed that is absent now? Or take any previous election. What are you actually saying here?

quote:

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I believe you have "moved on" in the sense that you no longer subscribe to the ideas that that work contains.

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You are mistaken. Mikol melamdai hiskalti, said Solomon - "I have acquired wisdom from all who taught me".

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Or doesn't that matter, either, to someone who's been there, and the next generations are just to make it up as they go, so to speak?

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Show me that they will do worse than their predecessors. They will learn their way, as we did ours, by taking the wrong paths to enlightenment. As Euclid said, "There is no royal road to geometry."

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I believe the 20 per cent who go to the polls understand what "citizen" means.

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Really. Let's agree to disagree.

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I'm not sure what virtues you would celebrate, in some political sense, and I've been really curious, lately, to know.

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Curiosity, skepticism, solidarity, collective thought and action, self-denial, indignation over injustice, unconditional love of humanity.

-------------------------------------------------

All of which I heartily subscribe to. But aren't you missing the polity that ties it all together in society? You know, the Greeks? Or are you imagining some process of osmosis to make it all gel?

And isn't your model of Homo sapiens just a bit of a new creation, the true loner riding up to do battle with the bad guys? Sort of a variation on John Wayne (well, maybe not the collectivist part)

Friedrich Nietzsche saw everywhere weakness, what was "human, all too human". His is the diametrical opposite of your perspective, u. In fact, one could say that your "ideas" stand in direct confrontation to his.

But you have to place your human model in some sort of working social arrangement. Beyond the kibbutz. And again, I don't see it in your reply to the question.

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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Flaws in what? That's what I'd dearly like to know. Your ideas on government, please. Of course all is flawed now. And if you look around you wonder what is keeping it together.

quote:

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Originally posted by George Victor:
Your ideas on government, please. Of course all is flawed now. And if you look around you wonder what is keeping it together.

But what should replace the flawed whatever?

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Don't take this the wrong way, George, but in tribute to the thread topic, and to my deeply held beliefs, my serious and sincere answer to your question is this:

Ask some young people what they think.

Ok u. Looks like the best I can do in trying to extract your thoughts.

"and you did not wear costume to tell your immediate world who you were.
Right?"

Valiant guess but...BLAAAAT!... wrong, blusterbreath. There were quite a variety of costumes being worn in rotation during MY late sixties... I fondly recall the pink djellaba, the caracul pantsuit, the WWI leather helmet, the dayglo-ed longjohns...

[ 21 August 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

I said I wasn't sure if I had read anything by Wilson or not, but I have read his contemporary critics, R.L. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, T.S. Eliot, etc. So I certainly don't think that there is nothing worth reading in Wilson, or in older writers and texts. In fact, you will probably be hard pressed to find someone else on babble who supports it as much as I do.

You called me a 'politically correct post-modernist', who, if not directly responsible, is at least 'ensuring' that 'youth do not turn out in any number at the polls'. I suggested that you were doing a disservice to cynics throughout the ages, and put too much emphasis on the apathy of the current age. Well here is another contemporary of Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, talking about his choices in the 1920 Presidential election, between the Republican Harding and the Democrat Cox:

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It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in the world. It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.

In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes. There is room for two sorts of them—first, the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and is willing to accept anything to make votes, and, secondly, the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold. Of the first sort, Harding is an excellent specimen; of the second sort, Cox.

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P.S. Oh wait, I have read some Kierkegaard, but only because I had to in philosophy classes in university. Clearly you can't be anybody if you haven't read dead white guys in philosophy classes in university. So I did that. But I waited until AFTER the internet was invented before I went to university.

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: Michelle ]

If you spend a couple of years in a Grade Two classroom, you realize the amazing potential for change that exists in our younger generation. But somewhere between Grade two and the age of majority, teachers, parents, friends, significant others (particularly significant through the teen years), the media, technology and events have combined to create concerned individuals, but with nowhere to take their concerns.

Because they've been taught not to trust liberal democracy's institutions with all of their contradictions. So they escape. Do their own thing. Remain a great potential force for good.
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I'll certainly be asking some "turned on" types (as they were once described) about their thoughts on the turned off, this Saturday in Guelph.

Real world and alive.

Will be meeting your 'turned on' types on a fishing boat in the gulf stream? Or will you be meeting them in a cabin near Walden pond?

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

Or, young people are our future, they are so full of potential, they are the hope that anyone older than (25? 30? 45? 50?) pins our aspirations on, as if we can't do anything from our positions. (Cue "I believe the Children are our Future")

Horsefeathers.

The first time I noticed this BS was when I was a recent non-teenager, and all the "oh the teenagers!" handwringing was no longer directed at me. But I still identified with the powerlessness of most young people, and the blame foisted on them, they who CAN'T VOTE, seemed out of whack.

And I never stopped noticing (and many babblers have said it already), that young people have historically been talked about in this way. This tells us more about adulthood, lack of empathy, and pass-the-buckism than it does about any particular demographic of youth.

And none of the fuss over what the teenagers are up to ever focussed on stuff the grownups could take care of that would actually benefit and affect youth, like, oh I don't know, eliminating poverty, lowering tuition fees, building affordable housing, removing systems of oppression from schools, etc.

I never studied world history, I never studied world geography, I suffered through the DWGC (tm) in "philosophy" class in undergrad and assumed all the great thinkers were DWGs. When I graduated from high school I recall hearing of great despair that the young people entering university didn't know how to write a sentence, and hadn't been taught grammar (they were correct, I hadn't been taught grammar in high school). I learned grammar from being a voracious reader (which is about my privilege) and having university-educated parents (ditto).

I graduated from high school in 1985, over 20 years ago. Of course, way before the internet and spellcheck.

[Crabby voice]
When I was young, the spellcheck was "Open the dictionary and look it up!"
[/Crabby voice]

Are young readers dead? I don't think so. But this conversation is more about what is knowledge, and how what is knowledge changes over time.

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Catch's post:
Will be meeting your 'turned on' types on a fishing boat in the gulf stream? Or will you be meeting them in a cabin near Walden pond?

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Okay, it can't be the way I phrase things.

Some suggest that too much time spent hunched over a monitor also causes difficulty in processing what is read.

As for learning from history, why should today's young people be any better at it than the rest of us?

(end quote)

I guess my main concern, bigcity, is for the assumption that just throwing "opportunity" at the young of our species, is going to take us out of the dilemma so precisely spelled out by FM, way back in this thread.

I only jest at my Luddite inclinations. The internet's potential for education and reform is enormous.

The unfortunate title for this thread causes a defensive response, and that has skewed much of the discussion as to the effect of IT (as opposed to books) in the learning process.

Young people should indeed by better at learning history. But the neo-cons of Big Mike's time reduced the required history courses from two to one. That was not accidental. That is the neo-con perspective at work.

In terms of my little joke about history, don't you think those of us who have lived history are in, if not the best, then certainly a significant, position to take on the activism and memory associated with that history? What's the responsibility of adults, former youth, to activism and knowledge?

For example, in 1972 when my sister was born in Lachine, Quebec where my family lived, my mother asked to have her tubes tied. As a married woman she needed the permission of her husband, who refused. Two years later, he agreed, and she got her tubes tied in 1974. 1974!!! All the media hoopla about how radical feminism changed the world forever during the 70s? Baloney. Yes gains were made, and they aren't to be dismissed, but much more remained, to be undone years later, again, by the activism of women. And this is just one example.

(I realize I'm drifting all over the place)

quote:

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Originally posted by bigcitygal:
All the media hoopla about how radical feminism changed the world forever during the 70s? Baloney. Yes gains were made, and they aren't to be dismissed, but much more remained, to be undone years later, again, by the activism of women.

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And in Lachine, as throughout Québec, trial juries were male only - until 1970.

Funny how the tonnes of books allegedly consumed by earlier generations of youth weren't enough to teach them that women should not be treated like subhumans.

Funny how Canadian youth marched off to be slaughtered (67,000) or wounded (173,000) in World War One, what with all the mountains of books they and their parents and grandparents read. Too stupid to even figure out why they were dying.

Shall I go on?

Today's youth are smarter, wiser, more progressive, more socially conscious, less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less ghettoized, more intermarried, more curious, less money-grubbing, less chauvinist, than at any time in history.

You want them to read the same books their idiot forerunners read? You want them to study "history" which misinterprets the past of humanity, of Canada, of the world, in accordance with someone's current political agenda?

Reading books became a sign of entry into the emerging middle class soon after the Second World War (Jacoby), and accounted for societal breakthroughs like the election of Jack Kennedy, the acceptance of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and challenges to the status quo.

Women of Quebec were the last of their sex to benefit from universal sufferage in Canada. I'd say a lot of invidious comparisons were being made by Quebec women as a result of being allowed to read dangerous works like Maclean's, etc.

Don't go lop-sided in gleaning evidence for yer argument, u.

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(quote)
Funny how Canadian youth marched off to be slaughtered (67,000) or wounded (173,000) in World War One, what with all the mountains of books they and their parents and grandparents read. Too stupid to even figure out why they were dying.

---------------------------------------------

The Canadian farm boy didn't read a helluva lot, as John Kenneth Galbraith told us in The Scotch. And probably like me old dad in England, food came first.

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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unionist: I don't enjoy long nonfiction treatises (very few are worth the length) and have often wondered why books can't be 20 or 30 pages long - with an option to buy more chapters if such be the need. Maybe the publishing industry can't handle it. Maybe some authors are too insecure or downright unable to present a thesis in short form and invite readers to go further. Persky's nostalgia about "browsing" in stacks of old books is a sign that he hasn't considered that problem.

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Maybe it's less profitable. In any case, this is an interesting observation. Here's some more thought in that direction.

Soviet era publications went through a radical change in the Gorbachev era. Suddenly, anything interesting was in the form of a shorter 20 or 30 page pamphlet or periodical. The longer texts were uninteresting and boring as hell, mainly because they were more self-censored than Gorbachev-era publications.

Another example.

Back in high school, as Plate Tectonics became more and more accepted, I found that my Earth Science class also consisted more and more of short articles from Scientific American and other periodicals rather than from textbooks. Ths may have had to do with the budget for text books and the conservative tendencies among science teachers with regard to text book selection.

When there are new ideas (Perestroika, Plate Tectonics to use my examples) the form in which the new ideas are presented seems to change. It's a question of getting the new information to the readers.

But perhaps there is more to that than meets the eye. The medium is part of getting across the (new) message. And the message is embedded in the "new" medium.

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

(audio)

mp3 file

Oh, and thanks to al-Qa'bong for the interesting spelling of boojwah. Very amusing. Despite the claims of Ellen M. Wood that the term is used improperly, I don't really see the harm in using it as a general term to describe (the dominant) culture under capitalism ... and using the term helpfully reminds us that every culture is associated with a particular elite or social class that sets the broad parameters and act as gate-keepers.

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

quote:

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There seem to be two opposing, but somehow related camps: Either young people are in big trouble, they aren't learning the classics, their style of dress is atrocious, what hope is there for the future??!? (Cue crashing chaotic music)

Or, young people are our future, they are so full of potential, they are the hope that anyone older than (25? 30? 45? 50?) pins our aspirations on, as if we can't do anything from our positions. (Cue "I believe the Children are our Future")

---

quote:

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Originally posted by George Victor:
Don't go lop-sided in gleaning evidence for yer argument, u.

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Let's dwell on your argument. I'm not the one making the thesis that youth are dumb, illiterate, and poor citizens of our polity.

Here's what I asked RosaL above:

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To be clear, I need an example of a development which has tangibly made young people today (say, under 25) stupider or crasser or more reactionary or less humanitarian or less environmentally conscious or more warmongering or generally worse-informed than the 26-50 group. Or pick any other demographic slice that suits you.

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To be clear, I need an example of a development which has tangibly made young people today (say, under 25) stupider or crasser or more reactionary or less humanitarian or less environmentally conscious or more warmongering or generally worse-informed than the 26-50 group. Or pick any other demographic slice that suits you.

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You are looking for a single, solitary piece of evidence? Prove categorically that climate change will adversely affect weather or that smoking will cause cancer?

Especially we are speaking about social dynamics that are harder to measure.

And, yet, the author being reviewed did manage to amass a fair amount of data.

If there is anything disappointing about the book, based on the review, is that it deals only with young people. That is somewhat unfair as it the phenomenon affects all ages so far as I am concerned and, gee, I'm not alone:

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At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber. But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news habits are worse. Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn't saying much. There's no way of knowing what part of the paper they're reading. It is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front page than dense stories about Somalia or the budget.

They aren't watching the cable news shows either. The average age of CNN's audience is sixty. And they surely are not watching the network news shows, which attract mainly the Depends generation. Nor are they using the Internet in large numbers to surf for news. Only 11% say that they regularly click on news web pages. (Yes, many young people watch Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. A survey in 2007 by the Pew Research Center found that 54% of the viewers of The Daily Show score in the "high knowledge" news category -- about the same as the viewers of the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News.)

Compared with Americans generally -- and this isn't saying much, given their low level of interest in the news -- young people are the least informed of any age cohort save possibly for those confined to nursing homes. In fact, the young are so indifferent to newspapers that they single-handedly are responsible for the dismally low newspaper readership rates that are bandied about.

In earlier generations -- in the 1950s, for example -- young people read newspapers and digested the news at rates similar to those of the general population. Nothing indicates that the current generation of young people will suddenly begin following the news when they turn 35 or 40. Indeed, half a century of studies suggest that most people who do not pick up the news habit in their twenties probably never will.

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[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]