{"id":23151,"date":"2015-02-11T16:03:08","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T21:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=23151"},"modified":"2015-03-02T09:55:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T14:55:00","slug":"author-of-the-dumbest-generation-tells-young-people-to-stash-their-digital-tools-discover-quiet-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2015\/author-of-the-dumbest-generation-tells-young-people-to-stash-their-digital-tools-discover-quiet-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Author of The Dumbest Generation tells young people to stash their digital tools, discover quiet time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Digital tools in the hands of the young \u201cgenerally serve an anti-intellectual purpose,\u201d Mark Bauerlein told the crowd in a packed lecture room during last week\u2019s Writers Read event at Eastern Mennonite University.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t Trust Anyone under 30)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The controversial claim of the title may have attracted the full house, or it may have been the theme\u2019s popularity in campus and class discussions this year: EMU\u2019s Common Read is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains<\/em>, by Nicholas Carr.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

Bauerlein painted a world where young people today are sucked into time-consuming superficial social interactions with members of their peer group \u2013 mediated by text messenging, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other digital forms of communicating \u2013 rather than with older people who can provide more thoughtful interactions and deepen them intellectually.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This led Bauerlein to ponder the importance of maintaining the study of the humanities in colleges and universities, guided by teachers who \u201clead students into a more educated, deeper experience\u201d 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\u2019s young people often don\u2019t have and wouldn\u2019t know what to do with, he said.<\/p>\n

Young peoples\u2019 habits of speedy consumption of information in a shallow manner \u201cis a deep threat to the humanities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He objected to multi-tasking when studying a subject: \u201cThe attention has to be complete; you have to clear out all other distractions.\u201d If young people would learn to quietly focus, he said, they will flourish as human beings.<\/p>\n

Eric Codding<\/a>, associate dean of students\/director of housing and residence life, and Heidi Winters Vogel<\/a>, associate professor of theater<\/a>, gave prepared responses to Bauerlein\u2019s talk, offering additional examples from their personal and work contexts of the validity of his observations.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Several members of the audience questioned some aspects of Bauerlein\u2019s 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\u2019s, questioned whether the \u201cgood old days\u201d of young people watching TV shows like the Lone Ranger and Howdy Doody were any better than what youths watch today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Digital tools in the hands of the young \u201cgenerally serve an anti-intellectual purpose,\u201d Mark Bauerlein told the crowd in a packed lecture room during last week\u2019s Writers Read event at ... read more about Author of The Dumbest Generation tells young people to stash their digital tools, discover quiet time<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":23176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4515,7931,5583,14184,356,5623,5730],"tags":[16288,10786,6374],"feature":[],"class_list":["post-23151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-arts","category-campus-community","category-campus-guests","category-language-and-literature","category-special-programs","category-undergraduate-programs","tag-mark-bauerlein","tag-mike-medley","tag-writers-read"],"yoast_head":"\nAuthor of The Dumbest Generation tells young people to stash their digital tools, discover quiet time - 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