Guess Who’s the Dumbest Generation
Offline http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/college-solution/guess-who-is-the-dumbest-generation/887/
Apparently, I’ve raised a couple of members of America’s dumbest generation.
I would tell my two teenagers that they belong to the dumbest generation if I could only get their full attention. They are often too busy texting, instant messaging, watching weird You Tube videos or playing with iPod apps to have an old-fashioned sit down with their mom.
And that, according to Emory professor Mark Bauerlein, who has tarred the iPod generation with the dumbest honors, is the problem.
While parents gripe about these electronic addictions, Bauerlein, who is author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, warns that these digital distractions whittle away at the intellect of teens and twenty-somethings and could also jeopardize their success in the workplace.
Now you might dismiss this as whining from a pedantic English prof, but some of the statistics are alarming. The average American youth apparently reads no more than eight minutes a day, but according to Nielsen Mobile they send an average of 2,272 text messages a month.
When a teenager is watching someone stuff a bag of marshmallows in his mouth on You Tube, he’s obviously not learning about the Gettysburg Address or following what’s going on with the health care debate. But Bauerlein warns that stunted intellectual curiosity isn’t the only causality.
Since so much of young Americans’ communication is done electronically, they struggle with reading verbal cues. Maybe you can tolerate this, but the boss at your kid’s first job probably won’t.
“We live in a culture where young people — outfitted with phone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another — are ever less likely to develop the ’silent fluency’ that comes from face-to face interaction,” Bauerlein writes. “It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish…when it comes to their capacity to ‘read’ the behavior of others, they are all thumbs.”
Now that’s depressing.
- Login to post comments
QFT
You're right, Waiting for Oblivion, it is the grownups' fault, which is why there is a chapter in the book entitled "The Betrayal of the Mentors."
Mark
Being angry at someone "using a device" without comprehending it's function is a joke.
Those things are increasingly used for work. My last job we had to text coworkers to keep informed on the work we were doing. IMing is common at workplaces now. Also, tools like these are increasingly more important as my generation fills the workplace.
But lets just blame the tools of communication and call them "stupid" for using them. That's the ticket.
Technophobes are hilarious.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Huh... wonder how many minutes a day they'd read, WITHOUT TEXT MESSAGES
(Yes, yes, i know their little study didnt even account for textmessage reading)
What Would Kharn Do?
That just means that they can read 9 and half texts every minute. Or all the stats thrown at us are alarmist lies to cover up for shitty parenting. I wonder which option is more likely to be true?
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
Whereas I do have a mobile phone, I keep it turned off at all other times than when I need to make a call.
I feel no urge to be "accessible" like that. By appointmwent only works much better for me.
Now... onto the topic of "shitty parenting".... which I happen to be a little opinonated about.
I am of the mind that the worst thing you can do to a child is to spoil them. Yes I have raised two kids myself. But I never gave them the impression that the entire world was revolving around them. Which of course is what you do if you go around tooting your horn about how your life is all about taking care of your kids. They will not respect you for that. In fact they are much more likely to hate you for it. Why? Because you gave them the impression that the sun was shining out of their asses - and they cannot find any confirmation for this being the case anywhere else (unless they are seriously beautiful girls, in which case they will probably be capricious creatures for as long as their looks last). What other conclusion can be drawn from this than that of your parents being morons that have no life - exept that of being all up your ass and interfering with your business?
This is a vicious circle indeed. Yes children are important and yes they should of course be taken proper care of - but no, it is not right to make them the centre of your existence and install in them a feeling of being the most important creature in the world. I have seen so many examples of how a child is allowed to run an entire household like that... having all the toys in the world... and all the stupid fucking parents are doing is to fuel that flame of narcissism until the poor kid is nothing but a self important twat beyond all hope of rescuing. This includes, but is not limited to, the knee-jerk act of thinking that your kid should be equipped with all the latest technological fads so that they can be popular and/or "hip" or whatever is the justification for the fucked up stupidity.
To sum it up: The problem isn't so much that kids are given technological devices as that they are made to believe that they are the most important creatures of the household, if not the most important beings alive, anywhere.
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
http://www.kinkspace.com
73 texts a day.... what is that like 1 text every 19 minutes? lets assume they sleep 8 hours a night then then its like 1 text every 14 minutes. yeah even with 100% of the money i make at my crappy little job im doing atm 2272 text msgs is more money than i will make in that month. how much fricken money do you guys have in america that is insane, then again you will have cheaper cellphone rates over there! Don't get me wrong i send hundreds of msgs a month but no where near that amount. I physically could not afford it and im quite well off for my parts of the world.
if i got the stats wrong excuse the brain fart.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
I like to call the old cellphone the electronic leash.
I've told people many times that I don't always answer the phone even if I'm there so if you don't get me it must mean I'm unavailable for whatever reason I have. If it's important leave a message and I'll get back to you when I get a chance.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
Most people here have unlimited text messaging...
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
I almost never answer my phone. I also rarely check audio messages (voicemail takes forever to get into). If someone wants to talk to me they can text me and I will respond when/if I want to. After texting a bit, if I really want to have a conversation I can call them. Most of the time though there isn't a need for all that hassle.
Text messaging is more convenient communication than anything else. I couldn't imagine what it would be like without it.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
very true... it tends to make communications much more streamlined than a conversation which invariably wanders around
for a while wasting time before getting down to business....
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
I'm all for texting ...as much as I can be. I neither like texting nor the telephone. I prefer people to leave concise messages in either format, and I expect conversations to be concise. I like my people in person for all other purposes; it's the reason I rarely call home and the reason I don't visit much! :P haha. No, seriously, I hate phone chat and I don't care to text endlessly about inanities or trying to decipher the meaning behind the shorthand people are using or their lack of punctuation.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Is it me? It's me, isn't it?
Do I win? I hope I win. I really hope it's me.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
how in hell do they make money then? Do they go to the third world and over charge us so you can have it for free? To get that here you have to have an insanely expensive contract. even so with most contracts here you dont get unlimited. Everyone here uses an IM that uses gprs instead of the outdated sms crap. that way is super cheap but you have to be loged ion to get msgs like that so meh it has probs. i supose i send like 2k msgs with that per month though.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
Obviously not all my life, but since I was 11-12 I've been using IMs of some kind to talk to friends (which some received/answered on cells). Then after getting a cellphone, I moved to IMing from there. Since everyone has a cellphone now, no one I know really bothers with IM clients on their phone and so just texting is easier. But it is really the same thing.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Texts don't cost the carriers anything. The bandwidth was set aside for out-of-band control channels. So they had all this bandwidth that was essentially going to waste. Some bright guy though, "Hey, why don't we send ASCII messages over the unused portion of the control channels?" And so they did.
That's why text messages have a maximum size. Each control slot is a set size, and the text message has to fit in one slot. You can break the message up (which is what most phones do these days, and that's what happens when sending binary data such as pictures), but then order is not guaranteed on the remote end.
Yeah. So except for a very small up-front cost for installing some simple software, text messages are pure profit for phone companies.
"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers
thanks for the laugh of the day