The Stupidest Generation? Eh, Probably Not.

In SPC 260 class on Wednesday we discussed the views of Mark Bauerlins article entitled Online Literacy A “Lesser” Kind. I found this article to be very true and interesting at the same time. Even though I am a fan and supporter of the Internet I feel that Bauerlins brings up some shocking points. Mark Bauerlin is very anti-internet. He feels that the Internet has made this generation the dumbest one ever. I don't agree with that of course but he does have his reasons for this statement and the reasons are not completely unfounded. He has several points but his main argument is that when people read things off of a screen from the Internet they do not actually read the whole article. Readers get lazy and just skim or scan the article often in an F like pattern.

I am guilty of this and so is everyone who has been told about this issue. I didn't realize it at first, I just noticed that I had a really hard time paying attention to articles that I had to read on my computer through the Internet. After learning about the F scanning pattern that we use when reading on-line articles I believe that learning and reading on a screen are not the best way to do things. I find it much easier to just print articles out and read them. That is if I am not too lazy and just don't get around to it. I know this is true for many other students out there. They find it much easier to read long texts when they are printed out.

Although I feel this puts a damper on the whole Internet as a learning tool I don't believe that it completely removes all education benefits of it or makes us the stupidest generation yet. The Internet is still a very important tool for researching. I think that our generations solution to the problem of reading on the computer could be fixed if we printed out things that were important to read and we would be doing better already.