When my mom told me last week that she was considering getting a facebook, I knew we had reached an apex point for Facebook users. An older lady who doesn’t think privacy is a four letter word and has refused to pronounce facebook correctly for the better part of a decade (my favorites: “Facepage” “Facecook” and “That Book thing you’re on that isn’t really a book”) is now considering becoming a part of the site’s billion users and she’s far from the most unlikely. There are places that don’t have a functioning water filtration system that have facebook. [Maybe if Apple created an app called “Water That Won’t Kill You From Disease” we could finally see third world countries have drinkable water].
So now that everyone and their brother is literally on facebook or twitter–from celebrities, politicians (too many politicians), moms, third world citizens, and finally will be dads–it’s time to take a look at some of the unintended social side effects. And one of them is that your kids are probably getting even dumber.
The last thirty years have seen an explosion in the ways young people can dick around. A category that used to consist of “Reading newspapers” and “Finding ways to pretend playing outside is fun” in 1911 is now jam packed with a half dozen major gaming systems, thousands of videogames, computer games, online multiple role playing games, IPhones, Apps for IPhones, IPods, Kindle (if they use a Kindle instead of just buying it as a status symbol and leaving it in their room), Blackberry, Twitter, Facebook, Four Square, YouTube, Netflix, and the approximately 4000 TV channels that are out there for them to browse.
All of them add up to a picture where a young person can–if they choose–not be exposed to a single fact. Only thirty years ago there were only THREE TV networks and family’s would watch the Nightly News together because, well, there was nothing else to watch, all three channels showed the Nightly News. Now the pop media landscape has exploded to such a degree that you can not only watch “News” 24 hours a day but you can pick which slant you want, either liberal (MSNBC) or conservative (Fox News). But by and large, young people don’t watch either one (perhaps not a bad thing in the case of Faux News).
Rather than watch silly news and boring information, they’d rather create their own content on twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. They would, essentially, like to dick around forever. The time they might have spent in years past having nothing to read but classic books and timely newspapers, they can now read learning if their friend is having a problem with “haters” or if a bitch is trifling. Never ending choices to fill one’s time has just given someone more room to hide from “broccoli” (news they will have to work to understand) that’s good for them but not tasty, and given them a buffet of “ice cream” (an idiot they can feel superior to on YouTube) to scarf down. I myself have gone down the rabbit hole too many times of getting on facebook and spending all day there, robbing me of the day’s potential.
Of course there are ways to use the internet to exponentially increase how smart you are. For all the porn, stupid jokes, and more porn, there are websites you can go to–for free–that will teach you how to invest money, speak a foreign a language, and learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about what’s going on in the world. [I can now learn exactly what happened in a Kabul street corner in a way I never could have from The Nightly News.] For every facebook page devoted to bullshit (“Shaniqua’s Weave” might have a half million fans) there is one devoted to a cause you can get involved in (“Keep Unions Alive” might have 25,000 fans).
But people have to CHOOSE to get smarter and so many aren’t. In a way it just further divides the country into the “Haves” and the “Have Nots.” We have a country that’s got more obese citizens than anywhere else in the world but also more fitness models with six pack abs. We have a country where the top 1 percent makes more money than the bottom 90 percent. And the bottom 90 percent are too busy watching a white nerd rap on YouTube or learning about their friend’s bad customer service experience on facebook to know the difference.
iz fb mackin u.s. dumm? i dn’t dink soo
umm…. yeah what he ^^^^^ said
I think it is. No one completes a sentence anymore.
It IS making us dumber because instead of spending our time using the internet to explore the historical knowledge base never known before to mankind at our very fingertips we instead comment on what our 3rd cousin removed bought at Wal-mart that morning. It’s pretty ridiculous.