8 REASNOS Y TEH PREVIOUST GENARATION WZ TEH DUMBEST EVAH!!11

Dear me, yet another academic has published a book complaining about how the Internet is making us stupid. I haven't had a chance to read Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, but there's a summary at the Boston Globe: "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation". It seems to be the usual stuff: young people are stupid because they can't spell, do maths or remember the name of the President, and what is making them stupid is progressive education and rock'n'roll TV soaps LSD the interwebs. Now there may be a grain of truth in Bauerlein's book (I'll let you know if our library buys it) but from the synopsis, it looks like he is simply taking a few of the skills prized by his generation, noting that the new generation don't seem to possess them to the same extent, and concluding that young people are "dumb". (By the way, is that really the sort of vocabulary one expects from an English professor?) I could use the same methodology to show that the previous generation is not that bright.

1. Computer Illiteracy

In a sample of 50 white, college-educated males* between the ages of 40 and 60, only two respondents were able to correctly explain the difference between the regular expressions "?" and "*", and none were able to read "#!/" as "hash bang slash". Similarly, in a study conducted among members of the Faculty of Humanities at Emory University, 77% were unaware that Java was not only a type of coffee or an island in Indonesia but was also a computer language, 58% thought that C++ was a grade somewhere between C+ and B-, and 18% failed to complete the questionnaire because they could not navigate to the web page.

2. Poor cell-phone skills

Most people over the age of thirty either cannot use SMS at all, or type so slowly one would think they did not have reversible thumbs.

3. Impoverished vocabulary

Large numbers of middle-aged and older people are completely unaware of words like "anime", "machinima" or "mashup".

4. Orthographical fixedness

Many older people are unable to decode even the simplest of letter-transformations, such as "teh" for "the". They also tend to be poor at phonics: in the aforementioned Emory University survey, less than half of the tenured faculty were able to read "ur" as "you're", though TAs did much better here.

5. Lack of critical thinking

Many older people are so uncritical of what they read that they send money to people claiming to be trying to smuggle funds out of Nigeria.

6. Inability to multi-task

Psychologists at the Stanford Research Institute recently conducted an experiment to measure the multi-tasking abilities of subjects aged over fifty from a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. In the first phase of the experiment, subjects were asked to write an essay on well-known subject; the answers were then graded by Freshman English instructors to provide a standard metric. In the second phase, a similar essay task was given, but this time it had to be performed while holding a conversation on a cell phone, chatting using IM and listening to indie rock: performance dropped dramatically.

7. Cultural sterility

Walk into any retirement community in America and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who can name three characters from Battlestar Galactica. You might do better with Star Trek, but only TOS.

8. Ignorance of local geography

To be fair, older people often have an impressive knowledge of national and even world geography, but they are alarmingly ignorant of the geography of their home towns. In a series of interviews conducted on a typical suburban street, CNBC found that most older people were unable to give directions to well-known locations like the best park for skateboarding or a cool mall to hang in.

 

* All statistics are invented.