Reading on the web is not really reading

Susan Jacoby laments the intellectual crisis now gripping America and says that the torrent of digital infotainment is threatening basic literacy and news knowledge One of Senator Barack Obama’s persistent themes, since the drawn-out US presidential campaign began in the snows of 2007, has been the need for parents to turn off the television, put away video games, and spend more time reading to and talking with their children. Although no candidate would be dumb enough to call potential voters dumb, Obama is in fact referring to the dumbing down of American culture over the past three decades — a phenomenon that can be measured by everything from a sharp decline in book and newspaper reading to the mediocre performance of American students on international assessments of proficiency in science and mathematics.

Obama’s approach is notable and novel because he is connecting the dots between the failings of formal education and a more general level of public ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism. Obama, the internet-savvy candidate, is making a point which Senator John McCain (who doesn’t even know how to use email) is ill-placed to raise: that Americans are frittering away too much time in the land of digital infotainment. This is not an easy assertion to make — it carries a political risk. Anyone seen as a critic of the public’s intellectual laziness will inevitably be charged with what has become the most powerful pejorative in American culture — elitism.

But it’s a crucial point. The triumph of video over print is eroding the quality of American public life. Since the early days of the republic, it has been an article of faith that expansion of educational opportunity is essential to American democracy. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts delivered a eulogy for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (who, in one of the more poignant coincidences of US history, both died on 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence), in which he asserted that the young nation was already distinguished by free inquiry and a ‘diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of’. Webster, a future senator and already a famous political orator, went on to declare that the fate of America was ‘inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand it will be because we have upholden them.’ For anyone looking honestly at the American intellectual landscape today, it is impossible to escape the fear that something has gone badly wrong with ‘diffusion of knowledge throughout the community’ — even though, ironically, the internet offers the most powerful tool ever invented for the spread of education. And everything that has gone wrong has gone particularly wrong among the young.

Consider just a few facts and statistics. In 2006 the US and the United Kingdom vied for the mediocrity award in science in the most recent international assessment of 15-year-olds, conducted by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The US fin ished 17th out of 30 countries, while the UK finished 14th, but the UK acquired the dubious distinction of dropping from fourth to 14th place in just eight years. US students, by contrast, held their own — that is to say, they did just as poorly as they had on an OECD assessment in 2003.

The standard political approach from both Democrats and Republicans has been to blame undeniable educational deficiencies on bad schools and bad teachers. The ‘No Child Left Behind Act’, a centrepiece of President George W. Bush’s domestic agenda, mandates standardised tests and evaluates teachers and schools based on the test scores. But the chief effect seems to have been to force teachers to devote disproportionate time to stuffing students with soonto-be-forgotten facts for the state-approved quizzes. The same teenagers falter when confronted with an international examination designed, as the OECD test is, to assess their ability to apply scientific facts to reallife problems.

Among Americans aged 18 to 24, four out of ten never read any books — fiction or non-fiction — unless required for work or school. As for news, the majority of people under 30 are not paying attention at all. According to a study conducted by the journal Television Quarterly, only one in 12 adults under 30 reads a daily newspaper. Television newscasts are watched by one in six. Those figures are no surprise, but the study also explodes the myth that the young have simply shifted their news-gathering to the web. In fact, only one out of eight Americans under 30 regularly reads news on the internet. Approximately half of men from 18 to 34, by contrast, spend nearly three hours a day playing video games.

It is hardly surprising that in 2006, three years into the Iraq war, nearly two thirds of adults aged between 18 and 24 were unable to find Iraq on a map marked with the names of countries — meaning that they did not have the slightest idea of where in the world to look. Even more ominous was another finding from the same poll, conducted by National Geographic-Roper. Nearly half of young Americans do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. It is ignorant not to know where your country is fighting a war, but it is arrogant and anti-rational to insist that such ignorance does not matter.

One of the more heated debates in the US today is whether ‘reading’ on the internet bears any resemblance to reading in the traditional sense. A horde of technophile writers and scholars (most of whom owe their living to the ‘new media’) predictably promotes the notion that worries about the decline of reading are confined to fuddy-duddy Luddites. A recent article in the New York Times (coyly headlined, ‘Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?’) quoted Donna E. Alverman, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia, who said that young people ‘are using sound and images so that they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented’. What codswallop!

A more revealing comment in the same article came from a high-school student, Hunter Gaudet, who observed that he never read books unless forced to do so and said that ‘they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed’. He added, ‘Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.’ American foundations and businesses are now spending huge amounts of money to develop more ‘educational’ video games, so that schools will not have to depend on pesky books with ‘details that aren’t really needed’. The Federation of American Scientists, an organisation best known for advising the government on national security issues, issued a widely publicised report titled ‘Harnessing the Power of Video Games for Learning’. The document was released in conjunction with the Entertainment Software Corporation, a public relations group promoting video games that has cornered roughly 90 per cent of the $7 billion gaming market worldwide.

Of course, the empire of infotainment knows no national boundaries, and neither do the knowledge deficits promoted by the decline of reading. But there are several reasons why the dumbing down of American culture ought to worry people in parts of the

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world that are still behind the US on the ignorance curve. First and most obvious, there is the elephant-in-the-room factor. If the US turns to video games to address classroom problems created, in significant measure, by children’s addiction to video, only a nanosecond will pass before education establishment Pooh Bahs, in the UK and elsewhere, start pushing school-sponsored video games, in the absence of any evidence of their utility, as a way to improve student performance.

A more subtle factor is the impossibility of conducting informed discourse, nationally or internationally, when most of the public has lost its ability to follow a narrative. As I write, the war in Iraq has all but disap

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peared as a presidential campaign issue in the US — partly because of the shaky state of the economy but also because even those who ordinarily pay attention to news lose interest when they are not seeing daily videos of dramatic suicide bombings. According to a recent poll by the Washington-based Pew Center for the People and the Press, only 28 per cent of Americans — down from 54 per cent in August 2007 — know that some 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the start of the war in 2003. In our culture of distraction, more and more people cannot remember what they knew only a year ago — much less what happened five years ago.

This intellectual crisis — it is not too strong a word — clearly transcends politics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a prescient 1837 speech at Harvard known as the ‘American Scholar’ oration, declared that ‘the mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself’. This line resonates even more strongly today, when the low objects are purveyed along an infotainment highway that fragments memory and encourages confusion between information and the genuine framework of knowledge essential to turning isolated facts (and errors) into a reasoned civic dialogue.

Susan Jacoby, who lives in New York, is the author of The Age of American Unreason, to be issued in September by Old Street Publishing.