Gaylene Preston’s documentary, War Stories: Our Mothers Never Told Us, is refreshing because it includes interviews with people in New Zealand about their sex lives back in World War II. The stories are candid, and portray a group of men and women who I can relate to. They sound like experiences that men and women in their twenties have today. I was 20-years-old when I first watched War Stories, and could still remember boarding school matrons, reminiscing about how pure and simple life used to be. They’re called ‘declension narratives’. Tales that begin with “In my day…” and go on to say how “we’re all heading to hell in a hand basket.”
It is the matrons’ tales, not War Stories, that I am reminded of when I read about Nicholas Carr’s piece about how the Internet is making us dumber or Lee Drutman’s review about The dumb generation by Mark Bauerlein, which is a pity, because I think that both authors raise some very interesting points.
According to Drutman:
...the way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
My question is, did today’s youth really develop a brazen disregard for books and reading, and is their struggle with ‘anything that bores or challenges them’ new or has it always been so? Or, put more simply, aren’t all teenagers more preoccupied with sex and themselves?
But as Carr would have it, it’s not just today’s youth who are getting dumb. We all are. And the Internet is to blame. Carr says thanks to the Internet he has lost his ability to immerse himself in a book or lengthy article. Now his mind “expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once [he] was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now [he] zips along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” He cites numerous other cases of this so-called deterioration of thought, from doctors and scientists, balancing them with a brief discussion about ways in which the Internet can enhance knowledge or the dissemination of information. He also points out that Socrates feared that the development of writing, saying that it would cause people to “cease to exercise their memory, and become forgetful, and the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century set off a similar round of ‘teeth gnashing’.”
We know that the new digital world is changing the way we engage with information. So what are the obstacles we face in integrating information meaningfully into our communities? The evidence to date shows that we are only starting to understand the answers to these questions.
(Image from this post "United States Marines and New Zealand women at the Majestic Caberet, Wellington [ca 1942] from the Alexander Turnbull Library)
