In the wake of what is sure to be the end of the world as we know it–and this doesn’t have to sound as apocalyptic as I make it seem–some are asking whether we are culturally prepared for the oncoming shift.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
We are not a literate society. We are an aliterate society. That is, even people who know how to read don’t want to read. They’d much rather get their stuff from television, or now from the internet. And without the critical skills imparted by literature, these people are going to rely much more on flash, style, and entertainment. Leaving them woefully unable to figure out their place in the new world, much less able to imagine the new possibilities within it.
But what’s the other side of this coin?
My just turned 4 year old son knows how to navigate the web with savvy. My other children have established strong social networks with people across the country through various web pages. The tendency is to turn back to the old standbys, to wax romantic about how reading requires a type of interaction that is inherently more critical, inherently more engaging. In the article above, the writer turn to Hannah Arendt who argues that with the growing requirement that media “entertain” we are emphasizing the (wrong) needs of the consumer.
There was a moment in the forties and fifties where critics fought back against the massification of society, arguing in effect that we were empty vases open to all types of BS from the “mass media.” And I’m not immune to making this criticism myself. But what people realized is that the consumer isn’t quite as passive as we were led to believe. You can send a leftist pro-free market media until the cows come home. Her attitudes aren’t shifting a bit. We can rail against kids sending text messages of fewer and fewer syllables all we want to…but doing so we ignore the fact that we can convey complex ideas in extremely small packages.
“Me. Whee!”
The above quote comes from Muhammad Ali. If I weren’t broke I’d bet that none of my readers could come up with a more sophisticated rendering of the ecstasy of being.
What valuable and enduring project or projects have emerged from years of afrofuturist information interchange? What valuable and enduring project or projects are you aware of that have emerged from any of the major social networking utilities? Which of the major social networking utilities have evolved from funded money-pits to the baseline of self-funded technology infrastructures?
Pausing on those kwestins for a moment, what types of major, profitable, consumer oriented commercial enterprises have thrived in the absence of madison avenue implantation of demand generation?
Pausing on that kwestin for a moment, imagine yourself as president-elect Obama. How would you go about creating mass awareness, interest, capability and action in any of the acutely necessary categories required to get the maximum number of folks unified in their efforts to make it through our pending rough ride ahead?
…and another thing.
As you may or may not have seen in the comments at my corner, as the ride-share chauffeur to school the other morning, I was disgusted to directly observe the way in which text messaging served as an enabling technology to promote the very worst habits of adolescent normopathy. i.e., the tendency by a nuclear mass of insecure kids to isolate, shun and/or ostracize other kids for non-compliance with arbitrary standards of “normalcy”.
IOW – instead of having a singular face-to-face medium of pernicious gossip and exclusionary vote-counting, these little evil twits now have multiple channels of self-talk and self-talk exteriorization over which they can reflexively and anonymously violate the golden rule at will.
My point is this Les, the resources, the technology, and every other material requirement to do the right thing collectively is somewhat readily at hand. What's missing is the discipline, the will, and the moral hygiene required for folks to get constructively busy. Given the extent of our affliction with seemingly incurable moral pathologies – all the enabling technologies in the world serve primarily as contagion vectors for what's ill, rather than palliatives and supplements for what's possible.
I agree. I was simply suggesting that we're going down the wrong road if we're suggesting that just taking the market out of culture is going to take us to some better place, as I read Arendt saying.
I'm waiting for the your spin on Obama choosing to send his kids to Sidwell. A few debates ago, Obama listed education as the fourth or fifth priority on his to-do list. I can tell you that if he didn't have 29k a year to spend, per kid, on private schooling, public education would shoot up to #1 pretty damn quickly.
I DO think that the Obama family has a unique set of hurdles. The choice of where they send their girls to school is NOT the choice that the Clinton's had about where to send Chelsea. Two very different circumstances. In fact I'd say the difference between the Obamas and every other resident of the White House also led the Obamas to bring the mother-in-law in to stay with them.
He's talking about modernizing public schools. Let's see what this looks like.
Well, gee, He's Harvard educated and rich. She's Harvard educated and rich.
interesting post… especially the argument of the consumer turning into a “prosumer”
Did you learn any of the basics from “School House Rock”? We need a modern “School House Rap”.
The value of education as a sustainable need is important within the Black community. I speak with people daily (making 120k yr – with only a high school diploma) who think that they've “Made It” while they're children are being left behind.
America the Illiterate? http://t.co/PO3osoX6
From the Archives: America the Illiterate? http://t.co/PO3jUONW