Last night a parent asked how technology was impacting teen reading. Alli has written about this before on Ypulse Books and there have been recent studies that show young people are reading less -- or at least less books. We've also heard lots of talk about how the reliance on virtual communication is hurting social skills and that texting or IM lingo is creeping into teens' schoolwork. I was thinking about this again in the context of blog post by Jaclyn over at The Schiff Report, which she posted in a comment the other day. Her post is in response to the coverage of Susan Jacoby's treatise on how Americans have abandoned intellectualism for "junk thought." I think I linked to another piece featuring her point of view in an Essentials round up awhile back. While Jacoby doesn't specifically target Gen Y, Jaclyn feels it's implied. From her post:

In a Washington Post op-ed, Jacoby also uses statistics about the decline of reading amongst Gen. Y to illustrate her disdain for video, which she writes is "first and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism."

With that sort of attitude, I can't begin to imagine how displeased she'd be with Ryan Healy's blog post, "Blogging is the New Graduate School," in which Healy describes the cerebral and professional benefits of the many tools that Jacoby criticizes. She'd probably find Monica O'Brien's post about using podcasts or vodcasts to improve presentation skills just as problematic. And of course, those are just two examples of the thousands of similar posts from Gen. Yers praising the way the Web can enhance skills.

So what's going on here? Are so many people in our generation blindly focusing on the good the Web has to offer, without honestly recognizing some of the drawbacks? Or if you read between the lines, is Jacoby perhaps making a statement about millennials' general embrace of the computer-laced path to the future?

I have to think that there's always been "junk thought" whether it took the form of early newspapers or "penny press papers" meant to appeal to the masses or today's reality shows. I guess the argument is that with more forms of media there's more of it, and that it's often disguised as intellectual when it's really not. Sounds like a fairly elitist argument.

Still, hearing two of the teen girls I spent time with over the past weekend decry their peers' use of texting or IM acronyms in their writing, made me think that to some degree the way we use one medium is creeping into more traditional intellectual pursuits like researching or writing for school. Teens expect instant answers from keyword searches and Wikipedia entries. Communicating virtually or consuming video content online usually requires a shorter format. Has growing up using tools that offer instant feedback and communication made Gen Y impatient and lazy when it comes to research and writing?

I think that may be the case now, but only because parents educators haven't caught up with them enough to teach more rigorous research skills using these new tools or information literacy around evaluating credible sources. As for the language issue, I'm not sure that creating and deciphering acronyms is less intellectual than writing full words or that it doesn't use a different kind of language skills. I do think growing up multitasking on multiple screens is impacting attention span. What do you think?

Sort of related:
Generation Google - a transcription of a roundtable discussion with teens on search, privacy and more tech related issues - thanks Derek!
Skewz - a new site "that exposes bias in political coverage from both the mainstream media and the blogosphere."

Posted by anastasia