Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Paul Nguyen
Ms. Lanz
AP Language/Composition A
20 March 2017
To denote an entire generation the dumbest generation is in the eyes of many, an opinion
that may misinterpret and undermine a large population. There are many aspects and viewpoints
on this subject which all must be thought about before declaring today’s generation the dumbest
generation. Taking into consideration the amount of technological and societal advances from
today to the 1950’s would be exponential. Presently, the invention of the internet alone is able to
create thousands of instantaneous resources that are open to the public. The internet and the
digital age make it so that today’s generation include different attitudes on things such as: the
importance of particular subjects in school, patience to read books in their entirety, and even
societal issues. “For the young American, life has never been so yielding, goods so plentiful,
schooling so accessible, diversion so easy, and liberties so copious” (Bauerlein 167), in The
intellectual skills and knowledge. While this may hold true in some cases, today’s society still
manages to compensate for these losses through, “Changing from a nation of callused hands to a
nation of agile brains,” says cognitive scientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University”
(Begley 168).
Since the dawn of the digital age, technology and the aspects of young culture continually
evolves exponentially to social media apps, smartphones, and the most important of all the
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internet. With the invention of unseen concepts, “Young people acquire various forms of
literacy (technical and media) by exploring new interests, tinkering, and “messing around” with
new forms of media” (ITO ET AL.169). ITO ET AL. presents the case of young culture always
changing, and conformity in society slowly turning into differences. Nowadays, social media
provides a foundation for young culture to share ideas and the diffusion of these ideas move
rapidly via twitter or facebook. “Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often
more motivated to learn from peers than from adults” (ITO ET AL. 169), because youth feel the
pressure from adults all the time, they are more inclined to perform poorly and this misinterprets
today’s youth being dumb. The youth of this generation would rather collaborate together and
unite against the opposing old generation because they feel as if most of the old generation’s
priorities do not align with theirs. “Ignorance of so elementary a subject as the geography of the
U.S.” (Simpson 171), with the massive wave of technological advancements such as the internet,
fundamental or elementary subjects are at a push of a button by anyone and gives room to other
areas of education.
Today’s generation receives a large influx of technology and the problem occurring from
this would be how technology, “Supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of
thought” (Carr 170). A recent study “Your Brains On Video Games” by Steven Johnson from
Discover magazine, addresses video games and imply their effect on the human brain. Since
some video games require constant multi-tasking, “Playing the game (The Sims) is a nonstop
balancing act: sending one character off to work, cleaning the kitchen with another, searching
through the classifieds for work with another” (Johnson 172), the brain is put to work constantly
and there is no time to focus on individual thing. This dilemma ties into how the older
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generation would assume that the younger generation is dumb, since they would not be able to
consistently read books or remember elementary information such as geography, history, etc at
the rates that the older generation put up. Concentration, a key factor in reading, changes
Proving someone to be dumb can have many loopholes if how the person perceives
intelligence or how a person measures intelligence is put into consideration. “But if dumb means
lacking such fundamental cognitive capacities as the ability to think critically and logically, to
analyze an argument, to learn and remember, to see analogies, to distinguish fact from
today’s young generation changing significantly because of the choices they make and the
difference between the old to new generation in prioritizing. This difference is a great factor to
determine whether today’s generation is actually dumb or just taking different measures to
project their intelligence that the older generation fails to understand. A study also shows that,
“IQ scores in every country that measures them, including the United States, have been rising
since the 1930s” (Begley 168), which would support the claim that intelligence in younger
generation is in fact growing but not easily accepted or perceived by the older generation.
Although today’s generation may claim higher levels of IQ and improvement in the
ability to multi-task, there remain few factors that today’s generation needs but lacks. Things
such as, “Knowledge and skills haven’t kept pace, and the intellectual habits that complement
them are slipping” (Bauerlein 167), Bauerlein addresses the problem of today’s generation losing
fundamental habits such as reading and focusing on things in order to succeed in one area. With
the digital age booming, children are learning through computer or Ipad screens instead of
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reading books which in turn leads to that trait of impatience. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by
Nicholas Carr, addresses the cons of this digital age and Carr provides personal anecdotes such
as, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a
jet-ski” (Carr 170), to emphasize the effect the digital age has on long-time readers like himself.
Reading books create a relationship between the reader and the actual book itself, meanwhile
using a piece of technology does not develop a special relationship between reader and piece of
literature.
Despite all these differences, in the end humans continue to grow and evolve with time.
There was a time when all humans did not read but instead pass down stories orally, and now the
time for reading books has pass and technology paves its way into normal human life. With the
advancement of technology and the growth of the digital age the older generation underestimates
the intelligence this new generation withholds. Although today’s generations knowledge,
intellectual habits, and skills are slipping away, they have created new habits such as
succeed with one another. With the digital age booming, there is a very slight chance that the
human race’s intelligence will plateau, but rather begin exponential growth of intelligence never