Kids & Their Technology

 May 18, 2009

Interview with Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
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Mike Carruthers:
The lifestyle of kids today is radically different than a generation ago - and it's due to technology.

Mark Bauerlein:
Never in history have you had such a nonstop 24/7 network of teenagers talking to one another - passing gossip and text and words and images and everything else.

Mark Bauerlein 

Mark Bauerlein, author of the book The Dumbest Generation, says this constant connection of teenager to teenager is having an affect.

A lot of the maturity processes such as exposure to the conversation of adults, trips where adults take you to museums or make you read the newspaper more, discuss current events at the dinner table with you; the social contacts, the social communications are reaching the point at which they're crowding out those maturity influences.

Mark is a college English teacher and he says…

You'll find more and more teachers telling you it's harder to assign novels of more than two hundred and fifty pages. Why? Well because the idea of sitting in a chair for two hours without interruption and reading is simply not part of their daily rhythms now. They've got the laptop on the desk that dings an email coming through, they have text messages that are coming through and they live in a period of constant interruption, plus they feel anxiety when they're logged off.