LETTER FROM AMERICA

Don't trust anyone under 30?

By Richard Bernstein

Published: January 14, 2009

E-Mail Article

Printer-Friendly

3-Column Format

Translate

Text Size

NEW YORK: Facebook, of course, is the social networking Web site that claims to have more than 150 million active users. Recently I became one of those 150 million, so now I can see the "status updates" that my friends post in the space provided at the top of each profile that asks, "What are you doing right now?"

Interestingly, nobody writes, "I'm checking my Facebook page." They put down things like taking down the Christmas tree, or wishing it was already May, or isn't it "awesome" that Mickey Rourke thanked his dog in his Golden Globe acceptance speech.

Now the fact is that those who have honored me by accepting to be my Facebook friends are, I'm happy to report, high-achieving people who need no lessons from me about how to spend their time. Still, it does seem a bit odd to me that so many of them take the time to announce to their social circle what are often rather unimportant daily matters, which leads to this comment by a critic of electronic communications.

"The great thing about the Internet is that it gives everybody an opinion and a venue to express it," Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a recent phone conversation. "The bad thing about it is that it gives a venue to everybody with an opinion.

"But one of the signs of maturity is to realize that 99 percent of the stuff that happens to you every day has absolutely no significance to anybody else."

Bauerlein is the author of a new book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)," and, as that long subtitle indicates, the concern is not about people in their 30s to 60s who take a few minutes out of their busy days to write graffiti on the whitewashed walls of cyberspace.

Bauerlein's concern is with teenagers, high school and college students, who, he argues in his book, are spending so much time engaged in digital electronic activities that they are losing the capacity to sit quietly in a room by themselves and read a book.

"We're about to turn our country over to a generation that doesn't read much and doesn't think much either," he said in a lunch talk to a group at the Manhattan Institute last week. "We have abysmal rates of civic knowledge and historical knowledge."

There have always been social critics at large to bemoan the shortcomings of the younger generation, and Bauerlein, who has both a sense of humor and a sense of perspective, readily acknowledges that he might look like "just another old guy complaining about the young."

To be sure, he allows, kids have always talked on the phone for hours, watched television, hung out at the pizza parlor or engaged in some activity other than reading the Federalist Papers or "Moby Dick," and one consequence is that American civic and historical knowledge has never reached extremely high levels.

But Bauerlein argues that the digital age marks an exponential leap since the days when the main distractions were television and the telephone, however worrisome those two instruments may have been, and still are, to parents and educators.

"The tendency of peers to group together and not with adults is old, but what digital networks have done is give them a whole new arsenal for doing so," Bauerlein said. "It used to be that at 6 p.m. kids went home and social life was pretty much over for the night, and when they went to their room, there was no Blackberry, video game console or Facebook. Digital habits are continuous with longstanding tendencies to tune out adults, but on a graph, the line is curving up very quickly."

There are statistics to point to in this regard. A survey by the National School Boards Association indicates a very large number of students spending around nine hours a week doing computerized social networking and another 10 hours watching television. Other surveys show a majority of high school students doing an hour or less of written homework a day.

Most important in this, Bauerlein argues, digital technology has erased the borders of space and time. Social life goes on constantly even while your teenager is sleeping. So while it used to be that parents could send their teenagers to their rooms to force them to get away from their group, now, as Bauerlein puts it: "The room is their command center. There is no private space."