Hypertext detractors

The second half of this century has seen the rise of three modes of electronic performance that happen to be short: the sitcom, the music video, and the sound bite.

New forms always attract critics, and these three have never lacked for detractors. Many have argued that these forms are debased by their brevity, and that electronic media are responsible for shortening our attention spans. In some quarters. These popular genres are dismissed as superficial spectacles that titillate and numb the debased tastes of the masses.

In the same vein, New Media -- notably hypermedia -- are widely assumed to appeal to the same demands for spectacle and brevity. Multimedia edutainment, for example, is praised by its supporters for its appeal to the "MTV generation" while detractors decry youth's loss of immersion in the pages of a good book.

But cultural observers always decry the debased tastes of youth. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for jazz and Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against the sneers of their elders. Young Romans flocked to hear Catullus and Ovid even as senators declared their poetry a threat to the commonwealth.

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Decline of cultural literacy

How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future?

The Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein demonstrates how the internet is making young people increasingly ignorant about almost everything except online video games and the narcissism of self-authored internet content. He draws a depressingly consistent causal relationship between the rise of digital literacy and the decline of cultural literacy. The more skilled kids become in using the tools of the digital revolution, he demonstrates, the more ignorant they become about the objective world around them.

The informational abundance of the Web 2.0 age, according to Bauerlein, is creating a famine of intelligence. And so the most tangible fruit of the digital revolution is the "dumbest generation", a term Bauerlein borrows from Philip Roth's The Human Stain, a dark novel about the collapse of educational standards in a digitally infatuated America.

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