iPhones Have Consequences - Blinn College

NOVEMBER 2008 11

image of God, recipients of divine love and grace, and me." But Zipper's thoughts are elsewhere: "I'll never

we bear the responsibility and privilege of extending get through my email at this rate." Tap tap tappity tap

love into the world here and now, and forever more. tap.

Two and a half years after Penny was born, I don't The project of Emory professor Mark Bauerlein's

think of her as defective, or retarded, or abnormal. new; book. The Dumhest Generation: How the Digital

I think back to that first evening of her life, when I Age Stupefies Young Americans and feopardizes Our

cringed at the words about the baby next door: "She's Future; or. Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, is to con-

perfect!" I still wouldn't call Penny perfect. I wouldn't front and dismande the claim that digital technology is

call any human being, besides Jesus, perfect. I am well producing a higher-powered, better-informed, all-

aware that Penny needs healing and redemption around smarter new generation than, say, the .01 per-

through Christ, as do I. And Penny's nature, I hope cent of the Facebook population born in the 1960s.

and pray, will be redeemed through Christ as she Bauerlein recognizes that we live in a world where

becomes the whole person she was created to be. I sus- anyone with online access can read the Bill of Rights,

pect Penny's whole person will include three twenty- dissect a virtual frog, take an online math quiz, tour the

first chromosomes, but only because any aspect of Metropolitan Museum of Art, watch a 1959 film of the

that extra chromosome causing separation—physical, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing

emotional, relational—will be overcome. Franz Schubert's Erlking, and read Plato's Crito, any

Just recently, we started reading a book about Jesus time of the day or night, for free.

together. We read the story of Jesus blessing the little But he also asks why, with all these advantages, so

children. Penny was fascinated. At the end, I told her many young Americans sound like the high-school

that Jesus loves her just like he loves the little children student who called a talk-radio show to complain

in the story. And I asked her if she knows that she can about "all the boring stuff the teachers assign," like

talk to Jesus. Without hesitation, she nodded her head, "that book about the guy. [Pause] You know, that guy

folded her hands, and said, "Pray." Now that I know who was great." "You mean The Great Gatshy}"

what to look for, I glimpse perfection in Penny's life asked the host. "Yeah," said the caller. "Who wants to

nearly every day. read about him?" The cultural candy shop is open as

it's never been open before, but evidence suggests diat

AMY JULIA BECKER, a master-of-divinity candidate at the kids aren't buying.

Princeton Theological Seminary, is a writer and mother Bauerlein offers exhaustive statistics that point to

in Lawrenceville, Newfersey. Herfirst hook, Penelope steep drop-offs in reading habits and general knowl-

Ayers, will hepuhlished this fall. edge over the last twenty-five years. In the eighteen- to

twenty-four-year-old demographic, for example, liter-

ary reader rates have declined by 17 percentage points

iPhones Have since 1982. This, says Bauerlein, "isn't just a youth
trend. It's an upheaval. The slide equals a 28 percent
rate of decline, which cannot be interpreted as a tem-

Consequences porary shift or as a typical drift in the ebb and flow of
the leisure habits of youth. If all adults in the United

States followed the same pattern, literary culture would

Sally Thomas collapse."
It would be easier to dismiss Bauerlein's claims as

mere reactionary hysteria if the collapse were not

already so evident. He quotes interviewees, from the

I n a Dooneshury cartoon of recent vintage. Zipper, "Jaywalking" segment of The Tonight Show, who
nephew to the 1960s slacker Zonker Harris, sits in don't know where the pope lives ("England?") or the
a college class, his laptop open before him, giving tenure of a Supreme Court justice ("I'm guessing four

every impression of industrious note-taking: Tap tap years?"), or the tide of any classic work of literature.

tappity tap tap. "Dude," a classmate instant-messages Their ignorance would seem outrageous if it

him. "The professor's calling on you." didn't sound just like the kind of thing my college-

While Zipper, stalling for time, asks to hear the professor husband has been reading in student papers,

question again, the classmate googles the answ^er and hearing in conversations with students, and seeing in

zaps it to him. To the professor's obvious surprise, he course evaluations for years. This is a 100-level course,

rattles off, correcdy, the names of the four greenhouse and we shouldn't he expected to do such complex
gases. "Dude," the classmate messages him, "you owe reading, griped an entire chorus of students from a

12 FIRST THINGS

world-religions 101 course, for which the core text was available but that it usurps high culture's place altogeth-
a trade paperback that my husband's father, a college er. As one college student says, half-apologetically, "My
dropout, had once been assigned in a Sunday School dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not real-
class. In another religion class, a student paper referred ized that the Internet kind of took the place of that." An
repeatedly to something called the momentous island, a Apple Store window display features a row of gleaming
phrase that mystified my husband until he realized that laptop computers and a sign proclaiming, "The Only
what the writer meant was that infamous school- Books You'll Ever Need." Not, as Bauerlein points out,
prayer compromise, the moment ofsilence. "The Only Computers." Not "The Best Computers."
In the digital age, the Apples have trumped the oranges
At the prep school I attended, "where girls pre- and rendered them obsolete, and already Johnny can't
pare to be tomorrow's leaders today" and remember what an orange tastes like.
where every middle-school student now
receives a school-issue laptop computer, ninth-graders While apologists for digital technology in the
no longer read The Once and Future King, because it's classroom trumpet computer smarts as an entirely
"too long." My eighth-grade English teacher, a patrician new form of intelligence, an "e-literacy revolution,"
Southern lady of pronounced opinions, used to say, Bauerlein offers page after page of studies that suggest
"My dears, you are not stupid. You are merely ignorant. e-literacy is merely newspeak for illiteracy. If students
And do you know why you are ignorant?" No, we visiting interactive sites and playing video games
really didn't, but we were going to hear it anyway: "You develop, as the claim goes, "the kinds of higher-order
are ignorant because you watch the idiot machine." thinking and decision-making skills employers seek
today," these skills come at the cost of time spent
This was thirty years ago, when there was only one reading, digesting, and retaining hard knowledge. In
idiot machine. Television, vehicle of Masterpiece The- fact, says Bauerlein, the average person's "screen read-
atre and Match Game 74, has now been joined by a ing, surfing, and searching habits... mark an obdurate
whole Information Superhighway, with a seemingly resistance to certain lower-order and higher-order
infinite number of exits to places that might be, but too thinking skills [including] the capacity to read careful-
often are not. Project Gutenberg's collection of elec- ly and to cogitate analytically."
tronic texts. Rather than connecting the new genera-
tion with the thought and achievements of previous Contrary to claims that computer use enhances
generations, the Web, says Bauerlein, "encourages functional literacy, Bauerlein cites research suggesting
more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry that screen time actually inhibits language acquisition
of people the same age. . . . It provides new and by limiting exposure to complex or unfamiliar words.
enhanced ways for adolescents to do what they've Even "software god" Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun
always done in a prosperous time: talk to, act like, tiiink Microsystems, dismisses the world of blogs and gam-
like, compete against, and play with one another," ing as "encapsulated entertainment"—adding, "If I was
nowadays in a hermetically sealed, youth-culture competing with the United States, I would love to have
cyber-bubble. the students I'm competing with spending their time
on this kind of crap." So much for "digital intelli-
To get an account on Facebook—as, in the interest gence," says Bauerlein, if even technophiles recognize
of full disclosure, I should say that both my teenage time spent at this generation's idiot machines as largely
daughter and I have done—is to enter a world in which wasted time.
people spend hours not only chatting but pretending to
be werewolves who deliver bowls of pain to each other, B ut are the machines themselves the villains in
or pretending to be pioneers on the Oregon trail who this story? Could technology, on its own,
eat each other, or pretending to be superheroes who spawn an entire mindless culture offlirting,gos-
make each other levitate. siping, photo-uploading, and virtual navel-gazing—all
in service of flipping off the phonies out there who
In such pursuits can an entire afternoon evaporate don't get that every passing emotion experienced by
while the sentences sit undiagrammed, the history Tarquin D. Pebbleface and set down in textspeak is,
chapter unread, the magazine article unwritten. The like, "wry and hilarious," dude? If, as Bauerlein claims,
Crito is out there, too, among the werewolves and the "the genuine significance of the Web to a seventeen-
cannibals, but Socrates sits in his prison in vain: The year-old mind" is "not the universe of knowledge
youth of Athens are busy finding out what breakfast brought to their fingertips, but an instrument of non-
food is preferred by boy bands such as the Jonas stop peer contact"—well, how did we get here?
Brothers.
The answer lies in the same dismal territory already
The real outcome of Internet technology, argues traversed by Diana West in her recent book The Death
Bauerlein, is not that it makes high culture readily

NOVEMBER 2008 13

of the Grownup: the wholesale abdication of adults, From the professor of Renaissance literature who
not only parents but teachers, in favor of adolescent declares, "Look, I don't care if everybody stops read-
self-government—a culture that nurtures its present at ing literature," to the urban teenage artist proclaiming
the expense of its past. that he's not trying to be "Picasso or Rembrandt or
whoever else, you know," the leap is short and damn-
At its heart, Bauerlein's book is not about machines ingly direct. If even the grownups believe that what
at all but about what he calls "The Betrayal of the Men- they know is not worth knowing, then the
tors." Simply put, the educational and cultural estab- grownups—"teachers, professors, writers, journalists,
lishments have sold out tradition and authority in favor intellectuals, editors, librarians, and curators"—are
of "collaborative-learning" models and objectives like more than complicit in the creation of an exclusive
"working with every young person's sense of self." teenage universe where the news is always "Me and
The average teenager, not surprisingly, views himself How I Feel Now." The technology, it would seem,
not as a student in need of enlightenment but as a kind merely facilitates the assumption that this is all the
of automatic savant. news that's fit to print.

"It is the nature of adolescents," says Bauerlein, "to Ideas have consequences and, according to Bauer-
believe that authentic reality begins with themselves, lein, the consequence of this particular idea will be the
and that what long preceded them is irrelevant." coming of age of successive generations who know less
But when the larger culture collaborates in this and less about the ideas that gave us Western civiliza-
belief, the outcomes are, if not actually disastrous, tion, and who therefore have less and less investment in
at least depressing. Bauerlein notes that in a Time its continuation. "Knowledge," writes Bauerlein, "sup-
magazine cover story reporting on the "Twixter gen- plies a motivation that ordinary ambitions don't."
eration"— the demographic of twenty-two to thirty
year-olds—"not one of the Twixter or youth ob- The kind of knowledge of which he speaks isn't the
servers mentions an idea that stirs them, a book that sort that makes a person rich, beautiful, or popular. "It
influenced them, a class that inspired them, or a men- merely," he writes, "provides a civic good." In other
tor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal words, learning a litde, a person might come not only
or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or to regard himself as a member of society but to regard
ideas or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the that society as something worth preserving.
talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of
them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, SALLY THOMAS is a poet and homeschooling mother in
or politics a helpful undertaking." North Carolina.

Paradise

I wonder what the counterpart
Of the patriot is in Heaven
Or is Our Father well pleased
By silence and implicit praise
And we arc at one with him breathing
Like a translucent plant that creates
Itself in each leaf—a paradise of light

—Samuel Menashe