We're Getting Stupid

Writing twenty emails a day will not improve your writing skills. Reading online, all day long, will not improve your reading skills. In fact, interacting with any kind of content, at all, studies show, is steadily reducing your literacy. In other words, there's more media in your life than ever, and yet you neither can understand it nor create it.

Who would have ever thought that the rise of digital media would contribute to such a horrible paradox. In effect, we have become slaves to content that we do not understand, and that is created for us. During an era in which there is more need for,and access to written media, one in which literacy requirements are skyrocketing, less people can read and write than at any time in history.

According to a tough-minded article in the May 16th edition of the Economist, reading and writing are destined to become even less important. A consequence of trends that have been in motion for decades (the article jokes, maybe even since the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century), in the last generation, the situation has been compounded by the rise of graphical-oriented content experiences, such as those to be found on personal computers, portable digital devices, and, obviously, the Internet.

How might we reverse such a situation? What would it take to make a child spend more than seven minutes a day reading a book, or a newspaper, as current reading estimates have it? Perhaps the answer is that we must remind ourselves, as a civilization, of the social worth of literacy and how education ultimately is the only responsible guarantee of our future.