Sign of the Times
"People are getting dumber."
I'm sure you've heard this kind of mentality before. Here's an author who wrote an entire book about dumb I am.
It's interesting how often people latch onto a few specific events, or a few localized occurrences, and extrapolate from them that our society or (gasp!) the entire world is in decline. People watch more TV, spend more time on the Internet, listen to heavy metal, and less time reading books and listening to classical music. Intelligent people read books and listen to Mozart, and dumb people watch TV and listen to Metallica, so we must be getting dumber...right?
I always wonder in response to these sorts of allegations: is anything really changing? Of course, some things change. Technology changes. Culture changes. The economy changes. But is it possible to point to a few things and discern from them that the world as a whole is actually getting worse in some quantifiable way? That's an awful lot of variables you're combining. It's too simple a conclusion about too complex a system.
One or two hundred years ago, books were one of the few options available to people as a medium of communicating ideas to the masses. In some ways, they were the only medium. So that's what writers used to do: produce books.
I'm pretty sure that if people back then had access to the Internet, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, they would have been sharing ideas with one another en masse, just like we are today, because people, regardless of what time period they lived in or the tools they had access to, have always been opportunistic.
I'm sure you've heard this kind of mentality before. Here's an author who wrote an entire book about dumb I am.
It's interesting how often people latch onto a few specific events, or a few localized occurrences, and extrapolate from them that our society or (gasp!) the entire world is in decline. People watch more TV, spend more time on the Internet, listen to heavy metal, and less time reading books and listening to classical music. Intelligent people read books and listen to Mozart, and dumb people watch TV and listen to Metallica, so we must be getting dumber...right?
I always wonder in response to these sorts of allegations: is anything really changing? Of course, some things change. Technology changes. Culture changes. The economy changes. But is it possible to point to a few things and discern from them that the world as a whole is actually getting worse in some quantifiable way? That's an awful lot of variables you're combining. It's too simple a conclusion about too complex a system.
One or two hundred years ago, books were one of the few options available to people as a medium of communicating ideas to the masses. In some ways, they were the only medium. So that's what writers used to do: produce books.
I'm pretty sure that if people back then had access to the Internet, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, they would have been sharing ideas with one another en masse, just like we are today, because people, regardless of what time period they lived in or the tools they had access to, have always been opportunistic.