Taking the Measure

The consumer-electronics makes consumers stupid—at least the young ones. That’s the conclusion one might infer from Mark Bauerlein’s new book, "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future." The conclusion is also the corollary to the hypothesis “Stupid consumers plague CE industry,” which I wrote about on Friday. It all has a nice symmetry—the consumer-electronics industry fries our brains, so we are too stupid to be able to set up and operate consumer electronics.

If you don’t have a copy of Bauerlein’s new book, you can find out more about it and order a copy here. Or you can get an overview of his theme by viewing this brief slideshow at Boston.com.

Some of the highlights: young people don’t read books; they spend their time and money on Grand Theft Auto instead. The predominance of video use, Bauerlein adds, makes schoolwork suffer. Boston.com cites a Boston Globe article noting that “Thousands of Massachusetts public school graduates are ending up in remedial reading and writing classes in college.”

Bauerlein says also that spelling is a lost art, thanks to instant messaging. And the Boston.com post quotes Bauerlein as saying, “On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you.''

In short, concludes Bauerlein, “"Kids are drowning in teen stuff delivered 24/7 by the tools, and adult realities can't penetrate."

And this can have a deleterious effect on the engineering profession. As I’ve noted before in the April editorial “Talk, no action on education” in Test & Measurement World, entry-level engineers are often more adept at playing video games than in working in a real-world laboratory.