The Intellectual Recession (P7)

(I was trying to edit this post and accidently deleted it...so here it is again.)

In the article ‘America the Illiterate’, Chris Hedges makes the statement that America’s population is divided into two groups rapidly becoming uneven in number: the literate and the illiterate; and surprisingly the one that’s growing by 2 million a year isn’t the literate one. He says that the group of literates as a whole is “a minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.” Hedges also says that the other group of Americans “dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information” can’t tell the difference from lie or truth.

The most profound point made in this article that stood out to me was the bit of statistics given about literacy in America. I guess that I have lately just assumed that we were advancing and improving our statistics as a country, so learning that in something as important as literacy we were actually slowly falling behind was rather unsettling to me.

Carr’s thoughts in ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ can easily relate to Hedge’s article. They both discuss negative impacts the internet has had. This alone makes them unique because a tool that has helped us so much as a society is usually not analyzed in a negative light. Though Carr’s article is a bit more argumentative, they both present strong evidence for ways that the internet has been a hindrance to our society intellectually. This is a very unique perspective of a tool that was developed recently as a new technology to ease everything about communication and retrieval of information.

I found this article very thought provoking. I’ve never looked at something as common and widely used as the internet as a possible cause for the slow “intellectual recession” America is experiencing due to the simple lack of a real need for Carr’s idea of literacy in modern America. Everything is so simplified and altered now that our values, like, as said by Carr, “the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable” are becoming much less common.