I knew it! My generation is dumb!

Here I was, spending the last few years of my existence behind in technological gadgetry, social networking profiles, and personal-interest blogging, finding comfort only in the authors who share my passionate world views and the books that tell my stories, thinking I was alone is my assumptions about my detached and anti-intellectual generation. After reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future or, don’t trust anyone under 30, I’ve realized that I am not alone and that my general synthesis about my peers has concrete backing and support. Bauerlein offers pitifully redundant statistics supporting the truth behind the intellectual decline of today’s young adults. He explains our decline in accessing the endless amount of knowledge available to us through the Internet and, although we are access Internet quite frequently, we rarely it for intellectual growth with social networking sites being our most visited web-destinations, “instead of opening young American minds to the stories of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizons to themselves, to the social scene around them. Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact,” Bauerlein explains (10). While it may seem that the world is larger and more open to us now than ever, the generation of people 18-30 years old are only merely interested and concerned with themselves. Despite our overwhelming sense of competition, need to succeed professional, and increased volunteerism, we are adequately behind in social and political awareness. Bauerlein’s book offers much of the statistics to support this claim, however, the reality is all too apparent. I, myself being a member of the “dumbest generation” has fallen victim to the isolation of intellectual integrity, fighting against the ever-advancing social networking era. I have battled with understanding social ignorance and wondering if my consciousness is a blessing or a curse.

My biggest take-away from reading the book is the clear and obvious lack of control in which situation has left us. Social media is not an aggressive scene that preys on consumerism; we have well-nourished and happily accepted the narrow confines of today’s society. We have found comfort in our ignorance. While Bauerlein offers a lot of criticism, the scariest reality is the truth in knowing that in order for this self-absorbed and mind-numbing trend to stop, we must ignite an intellectual movement that values social, historical, political, cultural, and economic consciousness. My only question is where and how do we begin?

Bauerlein, M. (2009). The dumbest generation, how the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (or, don’t trust anyone under 30). Jeremy P. Tarcher.