By Ronnie Amey, Editor in Chief
How short do I have to make this article for you to be willing to read it? Did you scroll through it to check its length before deciding to give it a chance?
I’m not one to choose reading long pieces of text as a hobby; I’m barely willing to do it for a grade. I may find myself occasionally enjoying reading if it has to do with my own interest, but other than that, it’s like watching a bad movie with no plot- boring and hard.
It would be so much easier for someone to tell me what it is I’m supposed to learn from reading a long piece of text than just have me guess; no one likes guessing games anyway. Everyone has heard that nothing worth doing is easy and, in fact, most things worth doing are challenging.
As Kosmyna says in “The Dawn of the Stupid Age” by Sophie McBain, “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”
The promise of technology has been to make life “easier” by creating a “frictionless” user experience. In reality, the ability to switch from app to app and watch an endless stream of short videos just by scrolling was created to capture your attention as you become addicted. (Stupid Age, McBain)
This rise of mainstream technology has become known as the screen age, characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness, and shallowness. The consequences are a decline in literacy and creative thinking, with no innovation to keep pushing the culture forward, and no one to break the previously set boundaries. In relation to the decline of literacy, studies highlighted in McBain’s article suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is dwindling. The reduction of creative thought and the reduction of resources needed for readers to develop a greater sense of reason have resulted in the decline in the hostility to superstition, as the ability to reason is the antidote to superstition.
According to “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” by James Marriott, the rapid expansion of print and literacy helped to destroy the socially unequal world of the past by raising expectations of the ordinary course of life.
Print specifically increased the ability to understand government on a more complex level for all groups in the socioeconomic ladder. This understanding led to more informed members participating in democracy, decreasing the population’s level of vulnerability to corruption. Without the knowledge and critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens in modern democracies would find themselves helpless, moved by irrational appeals, and prone to mob thinking. (Marriot)
Are you smarter than a fifth grader? I’m sorry, that may be too easy a question. Are you smarter than U.S Citizens were before the reading revolution?
The “Reading Revolution” was the expansion of education and the explosion of cheap books, which began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society at the beginning of the 1700s. The author describes it as an unprecedented democratization of information because it was the greatest transition of knowledge into the hands of the ordinary.
To borrow Marriot’s observation, “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”
Ideally, with an understanding of technology and the media’s negative impact on cognitive development, individuals would choose to make healthy cognitive choices. However, the ability to make such decisions has been shown to vary across the socioeconomic scale. As Mary Harrington noted in her article Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good, cognitive harms of digital media are more pronounced toward the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, with literacy and poverty having a long-standing inverse correlation.
Would you trust a chef who won’t try their own dishes, or a doctor who wouldn’t take medicine they prescribe to their patients? I would hope you answered no, but if the same logic follows, why would you trust a technology developer who won’t let their children use technology?
“Tech notables such as Bill Gates and Evan Spiegel have spoken publicly about curbing their kids’ use of screens”(Harrington). Research done in a House of Commons Committee report found that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills, and executive function than kids who are not. As a new generation is raised in a world having never known life without technology, they grow lacking cognitive clarity.
If you have read this entire article, I encourage you to make the needed change in your life. Instead of falling into an online rabbit hole of meme-slop, check out any of the articles I referred to and learn more about why literacy matters. Remember, only you can take charge of your intellectual independence. Yes, it may be hard, but nothing worth doing is easy.
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