Say it Loud, We’re Dumb and Proud

Susan Jacoby nails it in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post: Americans are getting dumber, and seem to be proud of it. One horrifying statistic she cites to prove it says that twenty percent of Americans think the sun revolves around Earth. Idiocracy is not so far fetched.

Our shrinking national attention span is evident from the fact that during the last thirty years, the average length of a presidential sound-clip played on the evening news shrunk from over 42 seconds to under eight. That’s bad news for liberals, whose ideas and opinions require more substantive explanation than the corporate media will allow. For every problem, after all, there is a simple–and incorrect–solution. But conservatives have mastered the art of the sound bite politics. It doesn’t take more than five seconds to say “we’re going to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”. Even if that statement is meaningless, it sure sounds good.

Jacoby has some bad things to say about digital media, though I certainly do not find the internet without merit. I have previously posited that it has become vastly more useful within the last five years alone, and promises to be even indispensable as technology improves. By simple virtue of the ubiquity of computers and their proximity, information which would have been unavailable to me when I was in high school–even at a library–is now immediately accessed. Satellite maps and high resolution photographs of far away lands are the stuff of which I dreamed when I was a boy. I never could have conceived of something as spectacular as GoogleMaps’ street-level view, which lets you see a 360° perspective of any spot on any given road in America. I recently wanted to see what it would look like to drive across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and in seconds, while wearing sweatpants, I was able to see it in color on a screen in my own home. Meanwhile, if I am so inclined, I can listen to T.S. Eliot himself reading from “The Waste Land”. Yes, the internet is pretty great if you use it right.

But it is simple to see that most Americans are downright stupid now, and I don’t have much hope for the future.

Filed under: Politics, Rantings, Technology on February 17th, 2008 | No Comments »