Countering "Intellectual Recession"

This post stood out to me while I was looking through my old post titles for one to revisit because the title “Intellectual Recession” and the basic idea behind it seemed a little extreme. I think at the time I was trying to come up with a strong position on the topic so I could have something interesting to write about without truly thinking over what my position was.

"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."

I don't necessarily agree with all of this statement. Though we may seem to be more "simple" because we can now so easily access information without having to truly use much thought, I think we still have the same abilities in our thinking, we are just somewhat more lazy about it, only doing this when we really have to. Today’s technology and society have made it very easy to not have to think for ourselves and sort of go with the flow, so it may seem that we are slowly losing the ability of deep or complex thought, but in reality we might just be using it less often.

While we don’t use 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, we are doing it in a different way, one based off of the availability of the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, whenever we want.