mm wrote:
"He said 'waldo', hee, hee."
> Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several
> decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print
> culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between
> Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the
> fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
>
So what are they learning when they get this "education"?
> Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what
> else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us
> Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their
> "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are
> not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash.
>
What do people look like when they are reading?
> The real question is what toddlers are screening out,
> not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
>
How is this different to them wanting you to read the same book you
read to them 36 times already?
> Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no
> evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August,
> University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight
> fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
>
> I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed
> citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles.
>
That is likely. Because what are you reading is what matters.
> As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written
> language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and
> quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988,
> the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from
> 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8
> seconds.
>
So you end up with folks like Oblamo with no policy just "change".
He can tell you his entire plan in one word.
> The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American
> adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth);
>
One in five folks answering polls is a jokester.
> it's the alarming
> number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this
> anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a
> foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge
> matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public
> policy on topics from health care to taxation.
>
Of course this defines the Liberal base that votes for the Democrat
party.
--
Like the Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes mountains,
Hillary is "ALIVE!".
--
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