The Media and The Government and The Corporations are often blamed for the dumbing down of society. In part, I agree. Yes, there is a Great Dumbing Down in process, but it is my opinion that we, the victims of the dumbing, are also those to blame. We unknowingly WANT the dumbing.

The Media and The Government and The Corporations only adjust their methods of operation to compensate for how we as consumers/citizens prefer to receive information. Furthermore, this Dumbing Down comes from our own senses of entitlement which are overfed daily thanks to the instant gratification provided by the Internet.

This morning, I found an article that really says it:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

The full article: Link

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Reading, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.