Fall Position Paper
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
- Hoyle Hodges
- Professor Stephen Beck
- Internet: Knowledge and Community
- 1 December 2010
- The Greatest Generation
The Internet and the Digital Age we find ourselves in has created a paradigm in the way we access, retain, and store information, both mentally and physically. With so much information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, it seems that perhaps Bauerlein is asking the wrong questions and comparing apples to oranges in his book The Dumbest Generation. Bauerlein seems to be stuck in a Cartesian mindset of humans beings totally isolated from each other seeing and feeling the world around them only through screens and digital means. Bauerlein quotes numerous surveys and studies both public and private to try to prove his point that today’s generation of young people are not as smart or knowledgeable as previous generations. He convently downplays the “Flynn Effect” (Johnson qtd in Bauerlein 91) a study by James Flynn that shows IQ test results increasing about 3 points per decade since the end of WW II. Each year these tests are “normalized” i.e. made harder to keep the average score at 100. Facts which Bauerlein and others try to explain away in part with; Cognitive psychologists explain the gain variously noting improved nutrition, better early schooling, smaller families, and wider acquaintance with tests themselves (Bauerlein 91) While I do agree with a lot of the data that is presented in The Dumbest Generation it appears that Baurlein and a multitude of others are invested in the process of learning instead of the results. Philosophers of the past, the great minds of Plato, Locke, Wittgenstein all could not have possibly come up with their original thoughts, not having the varied diet, kindergarten, and small families we have today. The paradigm in learning and knowledge brought about by the internet and the digital tools we use has produced the greatest leap forward in knowledge in the history of human kind. We cannot get stuck in the process over the truly outstanding results we see this generation producing every day. All you have to do is look at the advances in medicine, architecture, mechanical engineering, etc… for physical proof that the current generation is as knowledgeable as any previous generation. Knowledge does not come from eating free range chicken, (better nutrition) or plowing through 20 hours of reading text (reading for and of itself) Midgley comes much closer than Bauerlein in describing the state of knowledge and how humans acquire it. What we see when we look around us is not just the retinal image; we ourselves look directly at the world. The retinal image is a part of the equipment that makes it possible for us to do this; it is not itself a substitute object (Midgley 224) The Internet is not a “substitute object”, it is instead the “retinal image” a tool or equipment that allows us to more clearly see the world around us. The youth of today are looking directly at the world using the tools and equipment technology has provided them on a scale not seen before. Much is made of the various studies cited by Bauerlein, when you analyze who is conducting the studies and why; the vast majority is educator focused vs. education focused. The truism that you can make statistics say anything you want applies to this argument as well. The people with the most to lose in terms of power and money are the ones complaining loudest about the democratization of knowledge that the internet provides. Today’s generation has already moved past the process of yesterday, academia and government has not. The advantages of the Internet for democracy lie just here. As was observed earlier, both e-mail and web pages place in the hands of relatively ordinary people powers of communication and presentation which have hitherto been the preserve of the relatively wealthy (Graham 79). In the quote above replace the word people with student and relatively wealthy with academia and government and you begin to see the threat to the status quo that Bauerlein tries so hard to present in terms that disparage the younger generation that the Internet poses. The Internet has radically changed our access to knowledge and how that knowledge is retained and presented. The questions we should be asking is not whether screen time vs. reading is good or bad or whether video games make us smarter, we are already past the point of these types of questions having relevance. The types of questions we need to be asking should be more along the lines of does everyone have digital access, how do we or do we not regulate the Internet, what type of technology and the human interface with it will allow a moral outcome for both the provider and the user. The Digital Genie is already out of the bottle, there is no way to effectively cap it. Wishing for a knowledge acquirement process that served us well in the past and how we measured and thought about knowledge previously is not going to serve us in the future. Knowledge for thousands of years has been from teacher to student, mostly through the use of printed texts and books. The digital age has transformed that process, and while teachers remain a necessary and needed part of gaining knowledge, the process has evolved and will continue to evolve. Just as we evolved from an Oral Tradition to a Written Tradition, we are now in the throes of evolving to a Digital Tradition for acquiring knowledge. Today’s generation is the Greatest Generation just take a look around.
