The [computer] screen doesn’t involve learning per se, but, as Sweeney says, a particular “learning style” — not literacy in general, but “viewer literacy”. It promotes multitasking and discourages single-tasking, hampering the deliberate focus on a single text, a discrete problem. “Screen-mindedness” prizes using search engines and clicking 20 Web sites — not the plodding, 10-hour passage through a 300-page novel. It searches for information, fast, too impatient for the long-term acquisition of facts and stories and principles. As an elementary school principal told me last year, when the fifth-grade teachers assign a topic, the kids proceed like this: go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in. The model is information retrieval, not knowledge formation, and the material passes from Web to homework paper without lodging in the minds of the students.
Technophiles celebrate the ease and access, and teens and young adults derive a lesson from them. If you can call up a name, a date, an event, a text, a definition, a calculation, or a law in five seconds of key-punching, why fill your mind with them? With media feeds so solicitous, the slow and steady methods of learning seem like a bunch of outmoded and counterproductive exercises. In this circumstance, young people admit the next connection, the new gadget, smoothly into their waking hours, but the older “learning styles,” the parents’ study habits, are crowded out. Years of exposure to screens prime young Americans at a deep cognitive level to multitasking and interactivity… It improves their visual acuity, their mental readiness for rushing images and updated information. At the same time, however, screen intelligence doesn’t transfer well to non-screen experiences, especially the kinds that build knowledge and verbal skills. It conditions minds against quiet, concerted study, against imagination unassisted by visuals, against linear, sequential analysis of texts, against an idle afternoon with a detective story and nothing else.
This explains why teenagers and 20-year-olds appear at the same time so mentally agile and culturally ignorant. Visual culture improves the abstract specialization and problem solving, but it doesn’t complement other intelligence-building activities. Smartness there parallels dumbness elsewhere. The relationship between screens and books isn’t benign. As “digital natives” dive daily into three visual media and two sound sources as a matter of disposition… ordinary reading, slow and uniform, strikes them as incompatible, alien. It isn’t just boring and obsolete. It’s irritating. A Raymond Chandler novel takes too long, an Emily Dickinson poem wears them down. A history book requires too much contextual knowledge, and science facts come quicker through the Web than through A Brief History of Time. Bibliophobia is the syndrome. Technophiles cast the young media-savvy sensibility as open and flexible, and it is, as long as the media come through a screen or a speaker. But faced with 100 paper pages, the digital mind turns away. The bearers of e-literacy reject books the way eBay addicts reject brick-and-mortar stores… Or rather, they throw them into the dustbin of history.
Mark Bauerlein
Chapter Three, ”Screen Time”
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
