Author of The Dumbest Generation tells young people to stash their digital tools, discover quiet time

Digital tools in the hands of the young “generally serve an anti-intellectual purpose,” Mark Bauerlein told the crowd in a packed lecture room during last week’s Writers Read event at Eastern Mennonite University.

Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, is author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or Don’t Trust Anyone under 30).

The controversial claim of the title may have attracted the full house, or it may have been the theme’s popularity in campus and class discussions this year: EMU’s Common Read is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr.

Whatever the reason, the Feb. 5 talk was the most popular Writers Read event in recent history, according to Mike Medley, chair of the language and literature department who invited Bauerlein to campus.

Attendees ranged from undergrads to EMU and James Madison University faculty to community members, and the post-lecture discussion, in which Bauerlein fielded questions from among the diverse audience, was brought to a close, Medley said, in the midst of continued debate.

Bauerlein painted a world where young people today are sucked into time-consuming superficial social interactions with members of their peer group – mediated by text messenging, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other digital forms of communicating – rather than with older people who can provide more thoughtful interactions and deepen them intellectually.

As additional fodder for thought, Bauerlein pointed to the proliferation of teen-centered TV shows, rather than ones centering on adult interactions, as he recalled seeing during his youthful era in the 1960s.

He cited statistics of young people exchanging 3,500 text messages per month and accessing nine hours of media per day. Given that they only have six hours of leisure time daily, they are obviously accessing more than one form of media simultaneously, he said.

This led Bauerlein to ponder the importance of maintaining the study of the humanities in colleges and universities, guided by teachers who “lead students into a more educated, deeper experience” of objects truly worthy of their thoughtful, focused attention. Those objects may be works of art or music or literature, but all require quiet time to digest, time that today’s young people often don’t have and wouldn’t know what to do with, he said.

Young peoples’ habits of speedy consumption of information in a shallow manner “is a deep threat to the humanities,” he said.

He objected to multi-tasking when studying a subject: “The attention has to be complete; you have to clear out all other distractions.” If young people would learn to quietly focus, he said, they will flourish as human beings.

Eric Codding, associate dean of students/director of housing and residence life, and Heidi Winters Vogel, associate professor of theater, gave prepared responses to Bauerlein’s talk, offering additional examples from their personal and work contexts of the validity of his observations.

James Ward, a professor of religion at James Madison University who has also taught at EMU, commented during the question-and answer-period that his students spend so much time staring without expression into their devices that he feels they have developed a blank facial affect when he searches their faces for responses to the material he has presented in class.

Several members of the audience questioned some aspects of Bauerlein’s talk. One, who identified herself as a writing teacher, pointed out that immersion in digital gaming for hours can be highly thought-provocative, necessitating creative responses to other gamers. Another, who looked to be from a generation or two older than Bauerlein’s, questioned whether the “good old days” of young people watching TV shows like the Lone Ranger and Howdy Doody were any better than what youths watch today.