The Dumbing of America

[kevin_standlee]

As it happens, Lisa and I were discussing this very subject yesterday, to varying degrees of despair. Thanks to jaylake for spotting it.

The Dumbing of America -- not only are Americans getting dumber, but we're proud of being dumb, too. Possibly this is why intellectual throwbacks like Lisa and I enjoy old radio programs like Jack Benny more than most modern fare.

Comments

[howeird]

I don't think Americans are getting dumber, and I don't think radio and TV has either. I'd put Sesame Street and The Electric Company up against Howdy Doody or the Mickey Mouse Club any day as far as intellectual content goes. And while Jay Leno and Dave Letterman are not going to dethrone Albert Einstein in the IQ department, the perpetually 29-year-old Jack Benny and his sidekick Rochester didn't strike me as having any educational value either. We wouldn't stand for a Rochester stereotype on the air today - we know better.

I would agree that the integrity and intelligence of TV and radio news has degenerated greatly since Murrow, Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley went off the air, but that's because the marketing droids who now run the broadcast industry know that entertainment sells more ads than serious fare.

The article contradicts itself by complaining that people don't read, they spend time surfing the web and creating pages on social networking sites. You can't do that without reading and writing. Children are reading and writing orders of magnitude more on the web than they ever did in classrooms. And they've developed their own shorthand for text messaging, something our generation is pretty clueless about.

It's not a dumbing down, it's a paradigm shift. We are in an era where images are easily shared, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many more words do I need to replicate a video? Yes, there has been a decline in spelling skills, but who cares? The important thing is to communicate, and I kan haz convers8shun jus fyne widout dem rulez.

Well!

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Sir, Mr. Benny was perpetually 39 years old, not 29.

Re: Well!

[howeird]

oops.