Plog: Links, Articles, & Editorial by Perry Garvin

The Kids Are Alright

Adam Gopnik writes a terrific essay this week in the New Yorker on three cultural responses to the internet: “it’s gonna kill us all,” “it’s the best thing ever,” and “we’ve been here before, quit freaking out.”

I’m a strong believer in the last position and especially disdain the way criticism of youth gets conflated with the criticism of technology. You know: the times you go to a dinner party and you hear someone prattling on that kids have no attention span these days and that all they do is text message and don’t know how to relate to people any more and that the Internet’s nature of instant-gratification is going to cripple our culture and likely ruin our civilization.

That’s about when I excuse myself.

Consider this:

“At any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.”

Again and again, it appears, adults find the behavior of younger people and their relationship to technology and the entertainment it fuels to be a threat. And again and again, like a broken record, this tired narrative gets pulled out and played by the very people who were condemned just a few short years before by their elders who have now passed away.

This must stem from a social need to distinguish between youth and adulthood but I’d prefer that to be expressed in ritual (marriage, drinking alcohol, etc.) rather than in condemnation of youth as a category.

Read Adam’s essay here.