Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

My family always spent a week in Lake Tahoe in the summer, usually in August. During these vacations, my oldest brother would occasionally become so absorbed in a book that he would sit completely still for hours simply reading, without moving, save for the sudden, violent arm convulsion that was required to turn the page. No bathroom breaks. No idle chitchat. No chips and dip. He was busy burrowing through a few hundred pages like a book mole, unwilling to stop until his bladder burst or someone threw him in the pool—or both. We called this marathon reading "nerd factor," as in, "he's got some good nerd factor going on."

And my dad would sometimes fall victim to this deep, almost hypnotic state of reading. After making Super Scrams for breakfast, he would leave the wreckage of the kitchen in his wake and idly pick up a James Michener tome as fat as my head. Invariably, he'd be "lost at sea" for the day, simply unable or unwilling to drop the thing with a thud and participate in vacation. It was like the idea of a bookmark had never even occurred to him, and the mere suggestion of one would elicit a look of sheer incomprehension or outright disgust. He would not stop reading until he reached the end, by George! End of story. As my mom would aptly put it, he had been "sucked in." There was no amount of begging or pleading to go to the pool, play a round of miniature golf, or invest in an outing of horseback riding that could get him to stop. "Nerd factor, warp speed ahead, Scotty!"

My daughters also have this "nerd factor" ability; they can sit for hours plowing through a book till it's history, thank you very much! Not me. I get distracted half way through that tiny slip of paper that comes out of a fortune cookie. I get bored while reading street signs. Truth be told, I've become a big advocate of haikus, bullet points and communicating through body language alone. What gives? (Keep reading! I'm getting to the point, you with the attention span of a Drosophila fly!)

One of my brothers mentioned something about this to me the other day. He's having trouble concentrating, finding a book he felt enthusiastic about finishing. That got me thinking: How has our fast-paced, Tivo-fueled, Internet-surfing world impacted our ability to enjoy a James Michener novel that Paul Bunyan could use as a footstool? Has the Internet spoiled our ability to enjoy a good book?


Then I ran across this fantastic article from The Atlantic magazine by Nicholas Carr entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In it, Carr discusses the impact of Internet browsing/reading has had on our ability to engage in and enjoy deep reading. In essence, he posits that our flitting around the net all day gathering gossipy tidbits, sound bites, and snippets of news and infotainment has impacted our ability to "read." It's as if the Internet itself—with it's fast-paced, get-it-in-a-second nature—has reprogrammed our minds at a biological level, influencing the way we actually think and process information. It's cogent, trenchant, keenly written and, I swear, not too long. You should take the time to read it here. It'll leave you itching for a thick brick of Michener.

What Kids Say About Not Reading

Kids are reading much less today than they did 20 years ago, according to a recent study by Scholastic. Oops! My bad! I know, I should have warned you, or at least told you to sit down first, instead of just hitting you in the face with that cream pie of shocking news right off the bat. Mea culpa.

I read an article in USA Today about the Scholastic study and noticed something interesting: the kids don't mention TV by name as what they do instead of reading. In the survey of kids from 5 to 17 (too wide of a range to lump together in my opinion), 31% say they don't read because they would rather do other things. Like what? Huh, kids? TV perhaps? Why can't they just spill the beans?

That got me thinking: Is there still shame associated with nestling in on the couch and systematically inhaling a foot-long tube of vacuum-packed Chili Cheese Pringles while watching five staight hours of soul-sucking reality TV? If there is still some degree of ignominy associated with slack-jawed drooling at the base of a 65" hi-def plasma, that's a good thing! Hurray for the good guys! There's still hope.

The study also reports that 25% of kids reported having trouble finding something to read. I buy that one. It's true. Finding a book that's just right for a new reader can be tough—especially when you're seven or eight and can't just grab the keys to the SUV and thunder over to B&N or the local library. It takes exploration. It takes a lot of experimentation. It takes a flippin' drivers license! A kid needs a big person's help to find that first book or series that really butters their bread and initially greases the wheels of literacy.

On that subject, I found the article's little sidebar insightful. Here are the top five sources for kids to get ideas for books to read for fun:

1.) Mom at 65%—See? They're counting on Mom to help them!
2.) Friends at 61%—Nothing more powerful in publishing than "kid buzz."
3.) Teachers at 57%—Now I think many people would have thought teachers would be first, not so. But still critical.
4.) Librarian at 57%—That's why they rock so much!
5.) Dad at 43%—Not bad for dads, but they could do better (turn off the game!).

Anyhoo, it's always good to see my favorite topic get ink in the country's biggest newspaper. You can read the USA Today article here (there's entertainment to be had in the comments and in that interesting sidebar).

The Children That Ate America

My last post was about a class that kids sign up for to get comfortable with playing outdoors. That sad subject was still fresh in my mind when I saw this cover for the current issue of Time magazine, so that's probably why I laughed out loud. Oh, Mylanta! I know that kid! I see this kid every time I visit an elementary school. He's everywhere! And he's starving. He's not counting the minutes till school is out, he counting the minutes till lunch. Forget about Lord of the Flies, it's now Lord of the Fries!

You can read the article about the widening of America's youth here.

Simply put, American kids are turning into human garbage disposals. Listen to this: 14% of kids 2 to 5 are already overweight. Those are toddlers, people. Almost 20% of 6-to-11-year-old kids are obese in America. Not chubby. OBESE! Ever wonder where's Richard Simmons has been lately? Some kid ate him!

Hey, you raise a nation of kids on Fat Pants Donuts and American Idol and this is what you get. Once again, it's our old friend, the bane of America, the dang electronic cyclops, who's not just lurking in the living room any more, he's now lurking in every flippin' room in the house. I haven't seen any numbers yet, but I wonder how many homes now have TVs in the bathroom, so little Carl Jr. can keep watching SpongeBob while he keeps the wheels of fast-food commerce turning? (Oh, I think I just made myself nauseous—somebody crack a window.)

Just today, I was entering 7-11 with my son when a five-year-old chubster was exiting the store with a Slurpee bigger than my head! And in his other chubby hand he clutched a bag of Sizzlin' Picante Flavored Doritos that was bigger than my first car! (Okay, it was an economy car, but still!)

America's kids spend nearly six hours a day glued to a screen. That's a lot of the idiot box, a ton of video games and a lifetime of Internet time-suckage. Not a whole lot of time left to practice layups, but more than enough time to practice eating Lay's up.

I can envision a time when we're left with a nation of kids that can't jump a fence, dig a hole with a shovel, or skip a rock across a pond. Has America gone soft? I'm not sure, but the least those little porkers could do is crack a book while they're working their way through the next box of Double Stuff Oreos.

Summer and Teaching Kids How to Play Outdoors

Today is the first day of summer. At least for my kids it is.

Why do mom and dad seem more relieved and full of joy than the kids do about school ending?

When I was a kid, summer seemed truly endless. We left the house early and came home late. There was no TV watching (except for Saturday mornings—you simply could NOT miss Run, Joe, Run). Back then, we didn't go out and buy summer clothes; we simply pulled out mom's sewing scissors and turned our Tuffskins with the double knee-patch into cutoffs. Presto: shorts for the whole summer. With our cutoffs hand-frayed to look acceptably groovy, we were off!

There were non-stop baseball games in the street, and strike-out matches against the front door with a Wiffle ball and bat. We practically lived off the plum, cherry and apple trees in our backyard and scattered around the neighborhood. We played marbles. We played guns. We built forts. We caught frogs (and tadpoles in coffee cans) at the creek. We'd scrounge up some change and walk up to Hacienda Gardens to buy 5-cent gum and Spider-Man comic books, or drop into the utterly sweet-smelling and air-conditioned Sugar Chalet to buy a jaw breaker or a foot of licorice rope. There were constant sleepovers, water balloon fights, and crowded games of pickle on dad's precious front lawn ("Getoffadagrass, ya ninnies!").

We rode bikes around tracks we sketched onto the street with the white display rocks from the lady's house across the street. We climbed trees. We waited for something interesting to happen; it never did. We waited for a girl to move into our neighborhood; she never arrived. The Fourth of July seemed to take forever to arrive, but it sure hit big when it came to our blocked-off street. I can still taste the watermelon, and recall the seed-spitting contests. I can still hear the hiss of those little lady finger firecrackers, and the bottle rockets screaming overhead. And I can still recall the thrill of the desperate scavenger hunt down the street the next morning to find the "duds" we could still get a bang out of. Now that was Summer.

I thought of these times when I saw this article by Dana Hall in the San Jose Mercury News about a summer drop-off program that parents can sign their kids up for so they can experience the joys of playing outside. It's a "movement" now, half-jokingly called "Leave No Child Inside." How times have changed.

Is the Internet Generation Dumb and Dumber?

The recent extensive media coverage for Mark Bauerlein's book, The Dumbest Generation, indicates to me this whole subject has touched a nerve—and isn't it refreshing to have the subject of literacy come up in the national discourse? (It's a nice break from non-stop celebrity cellulite sightings!) As we've discussed here in the last few entries, this subject deals directly with the impact of young people reading less, and the consequences this shift is having on American society and culture as a whole.

I think Craig Wilson of USA Today got it right in this funny column.

Now Newsweek has weighed in with this article on whether the "Internet Generation" is really dumb and dumber than previous generations.

I think the Newsweek folks got it all wrong. It's not so much that kids can't access information in an instant with a quick Wiki search, more than it's the fact that they're wasting their time on the Internet socializing and watching YouTube clips. (Are they hanging out at Newsweek.com or at Facebook, MySpace and Hulu.net?) I'd argue the bulk of time spent online by the youth of America is wasted with the inconsequential and recreational, the fleeting and meaningless. (It's fun, but so is eating cotton candy.)

I think the real danger that The Dumbest Generation points to is the fact that we're losing our common culture. If 30 out of 30 middle schoolers can't tell me anything about Rip Van Winkle, David and Goliath or Pandora's box, then we're losing the common cultural touchstones that we use to communicate—touchstones that you're not likely to learn while posting photos of yourself "shredding" on your MySpace page.

Of course, I still have to read the dang book! (And here I am "socializing" on the Internet!)

The Cognitive Surplus and the Idiot Box

If I could get all the hours back that I wasted watching Hogan's Heroes as a kid, I could use that time to go to medical school. Twice. And walk/swim around the earth eleven times.

Regular visitors will know that I consider TV the anti-book. And it is. So it was with much interest that I read a truly hilarious column by Mark Morford on the San Francisco Chronicle's website. In it, he discusses getting sucked in by the tube in relation to NYU professor Clay Shirky's notion of the "cognitive surplus," which he defines as all that leftover brain power we are blessed with, but collectively fritter away drooling in front of the idiot box. You can read Mr. Morford's funny column here.

Shirky calculates that Americans, as a whole, spend about 200 billion hours a year in front of the tube (see above reference to frittering). The number is mind boggling. But, he argues, the web is starting to eek out a tiny sliver of this time, and he thinks that this still-nascent technology will soon unleash a new, participatory revolution that will change the course of mankind and the conceit of "free time." We'll see. But it's a cool idea: those billions of hours of "passive" time will slowly evolve into more active, participatory, brain-activated time. You can watch a fascinating 15-minute video of Mr. Shirky discussing the "cognitive surplus" here.

(I should note that Mr. Shirky seems quite a bit more sanguine about the future of the web and its prospects for the human race than does Mr. Bauerlein, whose book, The Dumbest Generation, I discussed in the previous post.)

Oh, I also read an interesting, but, I believe, somewhat overly optimistic, article on Newsweek's site about the explosion in YA (Young Adult) novels. My beef with the story was the lack of numbers/facts/statistics. Although this category of book has certainly seen an uptick, the numbers I've seen indicate that overall teen reading is going nowhere but south. Could it be that a small pool of avid-reading kids are just reading more? Hmmm. Either way, I was bolstered by the mere idea that reading may be considered a vital part of "hip" youth culture. You can read it here.

Internet Reading vs. Reading Literature

The notion that kids may be reading less is often considered not such a bad thing because they're using the Internet more these days. Aren't they reading on the Internet? Why doesn't that count? What does it matter what they're reading, as long as they're reading, right?

First, a few numbers to consider:

According to an NEA study, between 1997 - 2003 home Internet use soared by 53% among 18- to 24-year-olds. From 1981 to 2003, the leisure reading of 15- to 17-year-olds fell to seven minutes a day from 18. What's more, 58% of middle and high school students use other media while reading. So, apparently, when kids report that they're reading, they're often also watching TV, playing video games, instant messaging, emailing or surfing the Web. Consider that by 2003, children were cramming an average of 8.5 hours of media consumption a day into just 6.5 hours—by multi-tasking.

So what's the big deal? Kids can do more than one thing at once; they can chew gum while texting! Isn't that a good thing in our ever more complex and technologically focused world?

But according to a new book, called The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, youngsters are not spending their time learning on the web, reading Wikipedia articles about the finer points of Greek architecture or the root causes of The Great Depression; they're watching YouTube videos of guys riding scooters down stairs or saying "hi" to friends on MySpace and FaceBook. The professor suggests that "kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities—like opening a book or writing complete sentences."

The professor may have a point. Younger Americans do seem to struggle more than ever with writing coherent sentences, and many have difficulty carrying on an intelligent conversation—at least that's my experience.

I found out about this interesting book by reading a review of it in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. You can read it here. I've ordered a copy from the library (ordered it online while listening to music and sending text messages!), so I'll give you the scoop once I get my hands on it.