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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Dumbed down

Well, this won't be controversial:

To Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, the present is a good time to be young only if you don't mind a tendency toward empty-headedness. In "The Dumbest Generation," he argues that cultural and technological forces, far from opening up an exciting new world of learning and thinking, have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy.

Adults are so busy imagining the ways that technology can improve classroom learning or improve the public debate that they've blinded themselves to the collective dumbing down that is actually taking place. The kids are using their technological advantage to immerse themselves in a trivial, solipsistic, distracting online world at the expense of more enriching activities

Comments

Doug
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 9:38am

I'm pretty sure this is just a variation of "those damn kids and their rock & roll music."

Bob G.
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 9:45am

Technology is all well and good, but there comes a time when education and wisdom have to be added to the equation.

To have technology without them would pretty much be what we have today...folly.

But it does make the marketing gurus salivate like Pavlov's Dog...all the way to the bank!

;)

B.G.

Harl Delos
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 10:35am

It's fairly simple to make money in business: simply produce goods and/or services at a cost less than what people are willing to pay for them. With the much lower costs of doing business online, compared to brick-and-mortar businesses with high labor costs, it's easier to do that online than on main street.

Most startups, though, aren't businesses. They're gambles. They figure if they make enough noise, there'll be a bigger fool coming along who will want to buy them out. If they get big enough, fast enough, one will wander along - but most startups are "me too" outfits, and the supply of fools runs out pretty quick.

Those marketing gurus, Bob, most of them know how to salivate - but when they go to the bank, it's to the loan window. The difference between them and a pigeon is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a fancy new car.

Bob G.
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 1:38pm

LMAO, Harl...now THAT is funny...!

(You MUST be from Pennsy!)

B.G.

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