In his book The Dumbest Generation Mark Bauerlein makes a case for the declining intellect of younger generations and the ramifications of technological advancements. In short, Bauerlein argues that a "digital" generation is a "dumb" generation. One of his arguments is that modern adult society is doing a poorer and poorer job of moving young people beyond adolescence. Social technologies intensify and extend adolescence, and contribute to an increasingly narcissistic youth culture; “maturity comes in part, through vertical modeling, relations with older people such as teachers, employers, ministers, aunts and uncles and older siblings, along with parents, who impart adult outlooks and interests… The Web (along with cell phones, teen sitcoms, and pop music), though, encourages more horizontal modeling, more mimicry of people the same age, and intensification of peer consciousness” (p. 136). Neil Postman parallels the same arguments as Bauerlein in trying to effectively change the potential future of technology and the damage that it might be doing to the future generations. Although many of the damage that technology has done on the young generation, it has created a phenomenon. Now, many generations have the opportunity and easy access to look up any necessary information.
Bauerlein starts with a pretty familiar defence of print-based culture. Modern technologies crowd out and simply overwhelm the old methods of socialization and transmitting knowledge. At a basic level, the lack of reading is self-reinforcing: “as the occasions of reading diminish, reading becomes a harder task. The more you don’t read, the more you can’t read” (Bauerlein 59).The consequence of this is a society (or at least large portions of it) incapable of benefiting from those skills peculiar to reading. For example, habitual “readers acquire a better sense of plot and character, an eye for the structure of arguments, and an ear for style, over time recognizing the aesthetic vision of...