Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?

I would argue that before the internet, many people weren't reading at all, so the current situation is an improvement. Unfortunately the internet is heading more towards video so it won't be long before Nicholas Carr will have to lament the loss of text on the internet in order to get his press.

I don't know about it making us stupid, per se. I think what the internet is doing is making widespread 'communication' by the already-stupid more pervasive. The sheer (or should I say "shear"...) amount of misspellings, improper tense and other grammatical errors that one sees all over the net is proof positive, if anyone needed it, that at least in the US, our de-emphasis on correct and appropriate language skills in the last several decades has finally come home to roost.

"Site" for "sight"..."there" for "their", or even "they're"..."Me and him are buddies.." and the like are unfortunately all too common. Everywhere I turn, whenever I see internet text postings by what I'll assume are the Under-45 crowd, I feel like the gap between educated, literate people and the great unwashed is ever-widening, and like the little rift within the lute, will slowly silence all. Just as bad money drives out good, bad grammar drives out good grammar.

Shortened attention spans are the least of our problems.

But, that's just my too sense worth. :)

Hmmm.....you don't seem to make any distinction between published internet content and content that is merely a quick communication between people. It seems inconsistent to compare a 16 year olds text message to a website's "About Us" page.

Language evolves, so what you believe to be bad grammar is the proper English of tomorrow. Otherwise we'd all be saying "whom" and writing "L.A.S.E.R."

Inconsistent how? Since when is the context of a message a measure of its' need to be precise? Should not correctness be the goal, no matter how formal the message is?

I'm not talking about the relatively accepted abbreviations used in texting, because we've all gotten pretty much used to the ROFLs and CYLs of the world. I'm talking about actual misspellings of words that, no matter how language evolves, are not the correct usage. A Web Site will never equal Eye Sight.

I hear young(er) people constantly tell me that "I'm not good with spelling", as if it were a badge of honor or something. It never seems to be admitted with any regret. This, to me, is disappointing to say the least.

And to whom were you referring when you inferred that we don't use 'whom' anymore?.. :)

Inconsistent in the sense that you wouldn't compare the grammar in a note to a friend to the grammar in a book or a magazine, yet you don't make that distinction when it comes to your complaint regarding the writing on the internet.

When we write quickly, mistakes happen. If the message has been conveyed, and the medium is informal, what harm is done if the spelling is a little off? I think you would find that if asked, many young people could explain the difference between there, their, and they're.

"And to whom were you referring when you inferred that we don't use 'whom' anymore?.. :)"

I was referring to the vast majority of Americans. Which brings me to this question, if the vast majority of Americans use "who" and you use "whom", who / whom is correct?

You're correct - I don't make a distinction. Incorrect is incorrect, whether it's on a sticky-note or a legal document. There is a distinction, however, between formal and informal writing. But I can't agree that informality is an excuse for incorrectness. On a thank-you note to a friend, writing "Thanks for being their when I needed you." is simply not correct.

If the message has been conveyed, and the medium is informal, what harm is done if the spelling is a little off?

Ahh, but that's just it - those are two big "IFs". Decreasing the incidence of misspellings or incorrect usage will increase the probability of successful receipt and accurate translation of the message. I'd think it would behoove us to strive for a higher level of accuracy as best we can. As engineers, we'd raise holy hell if .01 became .1 or "cm" became "mm", yet we allow much greater latitude in non-technical spoken or written language. I for one would not place much trust in the capabilities of someone if they could not adequately and correctly convey information through language. Would you[ feel comfortable going to a doctor who couldn't spell?

And to address your final point, incidence of usage does not necessarily imply correctness, no matter how many people cling to the notion that "it's a living language so it means whatever we all agree on." A 'vast majority' of anything is no indication of right or wrong. Remember, half the people in this country have below average intelligence. :)

First of all, if what you are suggesting were true, language would never evolve or change. How could it? Any innovation is technically incorrect when it is first proposed.

Secondly, at one time clearly legible handwriting was considered important. Over time people started to care less about handwriting (perfect script) in the interest of expediency. Now people joke about how bad their handwriting is. Doctors are notorious for bad handwriting and it doesn't effect my choice of doctor in the least. So I ask you, do you pay attention to your script as much as your grammar? If not, why not?

I'm not saying you don't have a point, I'm just saying it is more snobbery than substance.

Alledgedly, Jackie Onassis died from an over-dose on her chemo-therapy due to a misplaced decimal point in calculating dosage.

The "Gimli glider" is the 747 that ran out of fuel and landed at an abandoned airfield converted to a drag strip. A difference in pounds vs kilograms of fuel on board.

The Mars lander that missed its landing site due to confusion of SI or IP units.

There's an old expression "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear warfare." I think Jim's point on the importance of accuracy has merit (even though on occasion, I am guilty of screwing up!)

So then you write in perfect script, or doesn't that count?

As Dirty Harry Callahan said "A man needs to know his limitations."

Cursive is one of my many limitations. Look at my earlier posts on this blog and you will understand!

"Amen!" to that, bro...() For several years, I prayed fairly diligently to eradicate the cynicism that welled-up inside me over a period of years, over the dumbing-down of our children and society in general.

Lately, I've arrived at the conclusion that it will never go away, because it is constantly being refueled! Street signs (small businesses) with blatant mis-spellings; TV ads (mostly auto dealers) spewing forth streams of abbreviated terms in Spanglishybonics and other unmemorable language (all that gets remembered is the VOLUME!) ... and, of course, ending every commercial with the obligatory preposition the obligatory preposition with (e.g., "to choose frumm".) ~ Watch Jay Leno and you have to laugh out loud at some of the newspaper mis-prints, etc. ... either laugh out loud , or start crying. And this so-called wonder, the internet, just ramps it up to a whole new plateau.

No wonder the high school drop-out rate is so awful (and NOT just here in Lousyanna!). Why in the world should a kid feel obligated to stay in school, keep their nose to the grindstone, learn the RIGHT way to speak and write clearly, when, after they enter the "real world", they'll be encouraged to toss all of that larnin' aside!

No apologies-in-advance, here, for the sentiment that I am in favor of every ISP having to hire a team of censor/correctors.

If'n dere aint no bowndreez den peepulz gonna alwaaz tayk duh pathh uvv leest difikultee eh?

an datz MI

Most of the bad "English" grammar I find is due to English being peoples 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., language. ...that and tiny Blackberry buttons and big fingers. Reading books is probably the best way to learn to write well. Not everyone can write with the greatness of Tolstoy, Proust, or Shakespeare but who really cares? Some people choose hobbies that get them outside. As long as we can find out the information we need, who cares? Should the people who chose a trade as a career path be penalized because they never acquired the same education as someone with a college degree? It might be fair to discredit those without the motivation to receive education, but it's unfair to generalize.

I agree that poor spelling and bad grammar are more an annoyance than a barrier to communication. What I find most disturbing is the lack of critical thinking and the abundance of bad information.

Purists like to think that language is a sacred gift to us from our ancestors, and that the purpose of language is to share ideas, intentions, and information. In our culture it is more often seen as a bag of cheap tricks, used to hide our intentions, to sway opinion through emotion, and to conceal our lack of information. The dumbing down began long before the advent of the internet. I blame TV (advertising and programming), politicians (most of them), and our ambivalence toward education.

Mostly I blame our tenuous relationship with with honesty. I think we in the developed world sense that there are many 'chickens coming home to roost', and find that an honest look at where we are headed is just too scary. These fears may be misplaced, but they are easier to ignore than to confront. So we tend to fill ourselves with clever BS that avoids the scary stuff. And then when we speak or write, guess what comes out...

I completely agree. The problem is not that young people use this type of "mislanguage", the problem is that for most of them is the only they know. I am part-time lecturer in the university since 20 years ago and I can tell you the average amount of words known (or used) has been decreasing more or less continuously through this years.

This is because the rate of reading books has decreased accordingly, and "general culture" is becoming lower and lower.

The students may perhaps be able of performing the most complicated calculation, but they have high difficulties to express ideas either verbally or in written.

Best regards

Good answer vote! It isn't just the 16-yr olds. Even well respected trade magazines send me emails for a "complementary subscription" and I write them back asking them what it complements. I guess they don't get my compliments.

Spell checker is no substitute for proof reading.

I was thinking about reading the whole article, but, geez, that's a lot of time invested...can't someone post a synopsis for us?

"it also encourages us not to look at it very thoughtfully."

If we did, we would not do anything else for 24 hours a day. I don't find it stupid to move quickly through the piles of junk!

"Re: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?"

No. It does however show how stupid we are!

No, I was already stupid.

Internet by itself is neutral, it is just a mean of communication.

The content is another thing and it is in synchrony with the times, habits and culture we are living.

Stupidity can have an genetic origin (the least) and an education origin (the most).

If children get almost anything they can imagine without the least effort, they would think they deserve everything just because they exist. That does not help to educate people. Reading needs an effort, and you need have a minimum educational level to understand what you are reading (otherwise we have a case of "functional illiteracy")

The people began to be more stupid with TV, much older than Internet. It was the "image culture" which serves the information in a way more easy to digest and allowing people to get information without effort (and without thinking too much)

Reading is an habit and should be the result of a correct education, as using the knife and fork instead of bare hands to eat, but we unfortunately are immersed in the image culture.

Internet is a useful tool, even you can get a lot of free electronic books, but what is the fraction of internauts that use them? And, what is the fraction who use it to chat with friends ( in that new sort of language) , download music, watch Youtube videos, etc?

I think Mr. Carr is wrong (or not completely right): The problem began before access to Internet become so popular. It is just another brick on the wall...

Best regards

" It is just another brick on the wall..."

Awesome song, the movie was a little strange though!

Yes

By the way, do you know that some months ago Pink Floyd allowed to use this song for a campaign against our "new" matter that our Government obliged the children to study? I made some lyrics modifications: We don't need such education....

Its name is "Education for citizenship" and reminds me what we have to pass (not study) in Franco's times called "National Spirit Education". The content of what I could read from the official books is terrifying. It does not try to educate, just to convert the children in brainless obedient sheep.

Some politicians use to forget that the world is round and if you go far left, you can reach far right.

The Internet is the ultimate educational resource. I find when any of my stuff breaks or has issues (car, digital camera, computer, etc) a solution can be quickly found within minutes. The danger is with all the "opinions" posted in forums and blogs without any information to quantify their validity. You have to be able to filter out the bad information. That takes a balance of common sense, intelligence, and guess work.

The "BIG" danger is how easily accessible all the stupidity and smut is. When our teenagers spend their days looking at porn and You Tube videos of people doing stupid stunts, doesn't that put them at risk?

I dink dat this Nikolus guy needs to undar stand y would wood you need to mix eggs, water and flower when u can by dough. Its an evolution thing. The more da people have information and are imformed da better it is for our sosighity. Who was da guy that said knowledge is power. I dont dink he nows dis Carr guy to wel.

No, I was already somewhat stupid before the internet, and still am (are? is? now?)

No. I think society has done it all on it's own.

"If'n dere aint no bowndreez den peepulz gonna alwaaz tayk duh pathh uvv leest difikultee eh?" And having writ I now come back to say there is something wrong with this system merging paragraphs and with no spell check available. Although a gross example of misspelled English, not unrelated to region and economic class, I see nothing wrong with the above, although formally much wrong. I say that because such an expression indicates an intelligence behind it that raises serious social and conceptual issues. I would see in the author of such a sentence a thinking intellect and rather than correct his use of English, I would commend his use of intellect in being able to pose the conceptual issue, by posing a response along the lines of "Well... why do you think it wrong to take the path of least difficulty. Being is hard. Why should we not look for the easiest path?" I say this because I am fully aware that amongst those we expect most of there is a tendency to "tayk," in the interest of expediency when rigor and hard work are actually what is needed, say mathematics, "duh pathh uvv leest difikultee eh?" I have in mind the teachers of the "New, new, math" as it has been called, but not only them. Many of those teachers are fond of quoting Piaget as to the education of children, but only in a superficial way. They had no concept that Piaget, even before the development of technology that allows us to actually observe the human brain at work, was speaking about the process' in which exetrcise actually changes the physical nature of brain organization, or more accurately, adds to it. Hence, in some years I spent recently at university, and some hours in a remedial math class, I discovered teachers arguing that it was not necessary to spend long hours doing exercises, and more hours correcting them, insofar as a five dollar calculator could do the drudgery and we could go on, while blithly writing a new math function equation on the board, to higher and more important mental functions. Little did she understand, because she apparently understood little if anything about brain development although she was a math education specialist, that she was allowing the crystallization of elements in the calculator to replace the development of synapses in our human brains; that essential to building higher mental functions in our brains. Some here might be offended by this next but I was not suprised to find out that she was also enmeshed in religion. Thus, rather than focus on the formality of the technical niceties of proper language, be it English or otherwise, I am not suprised to discover that recent studies find that amongst all of this high technology including that which we use, crudely or otherwise, to communicate with each other, there is a huge rise in religious belief and more speciffically in religious beliefs as to origin of species as opposed to evolutionary ones. Worse, on viewing tapes of debates on the issue, I find that those arguing for evolution are more interested in making debators points rather than get at the conceptual issues involved, i.e., the methodology of science at base. I would therefore caution against allowing formalism to get in the way of serious material discussion, no matter how unschooled someone might appear. As the gentleman in Madrid pointed out, however subtley, we live in a time when we are being educated to formal acceptence to serve the needs of such as Franco, rather than to analyse, to take apart as good scientific sceptics, every thing that comes in front of us. Rather than distance ourselves from those whose speech and written language is not as good as ours, we all would be better served to take up conversation with a view to broadening and deepening. I know that many times when we get above appearing surface crudities we will find beneath intelligent questioning minds that have been poorly served by a deficient educational system that in its commercial haste to turn out highly educated scientists is in fact turning out the opposite as exemplified by the math teacher I spoke of above. And having written all this I now find, for some reason, no spell check and have to rely on your mercy for what must be my many misspellings. For some reason I see that all my paragraphs have been merged but having written at length I must hope you will read. j.

Re: "Well... why do you think it wrong to take the path of least difficulty. Being is hard. Why should we not look for the easiest path?"

I assume this to have been a rhetorical question, since you answered it quite eloquently further down with the statement:

"... Piaget (even before the development of technology that allows us to actually observe the human brain at work) was speaking about the process in which exercise actually changes the physical nature of brain organization, or more accurately, adds to it."

I'll admit that some great minds, both past and present, may in fact have stumbled their way to greatness, while overlooking (i.e., ignoring) many of the subcritical details and nuances within their various studies.

For MOST people, such shortcuts inflict more harm than is offset by the miniscule headway afforded by same. There are at least several documented instances where teams of engineers (sorry if this offends anyone here) spent countless man-hours and untold millions on a project ... only to suffer an agonizing failure because the entire collective managed to overlook something that ((after-the-fact)) was determined to be at the root of the cause, and, astounding-as-it-may-be, was assumed to have been a "common sense" / "every engineer ought to know that!" sort of concept (or detail).

This example is given as a worst-case scenario, of course. But... maybe it ISN'T the worst-case... What if EVERYBODY took this attitude, about taking the easy way?

What sort of teachers would we have teaching the generations that follow?

What about the "plain old tradespeople" in a factory, learning a semi-technical job via "OJT" from an old-timer, who HIMSELF learnded evrting he nose by taking the easy-way-out...?

Kudos to all posters here, who understand and appreciate the importance of striving for accuracy in any-and-all communications! Any journalists stumbling into this discussion, take things to heart ...

... should you ever find yourself in the field of action with soldiers, and witness the start-up of a mess hall fire, choose your specific words carefully: "Grease fire in the mess tent!" ... NOT simply "Fire!"

Clarity before Conciseness before Brevity ... but all hand-in-hand with accuracy!

This morning, hearing the radio news I've heard the results of this year statistics on school level, on young people who are to go to high school. The local government makes every year some type of examinations to check the real situation of education. The results just published is an average of 5,6 (maximum being 10). Last year was 6,2. Main areas identified that must be reinforced are language and math.

Opinions may vary but the facts use to be a more solid base.

Of course the results are from the Madrid area. But as I think, the trend is similar in other places. In that precise blog, several fellows have pointed more or less the same and come from different countries.

Someone could justify that above results are a consequence of language evolution?

... and, on OUR local tv station this morning, the news journalist reported a story (with video) in a semi-pompous, "He's getting what he deserves" sort of way ...

... a story about a teenager who got kicked out of school for excessive talking, even after being instructed repeatedly to stop.

The young man has to pace the sidewalk, back-and-forth, wearing a placard-sign (which he had to make himself), which sadly professes:

"I got kicked out of school for talking to much."

I'd like to ask this young fellow: "Who is this 'much' person, to whom you spoke?"

The best thing about the full Article by Nicholas Carr, was on pages 3 and 4 (Did you read the full Article: Read the whole article), where he thoughtfully explained why he wrote that Article, in Atlantic Monthly".

Kind Regards....

It makes no difference to me