Not so shallow after all ...

Harry Eyres

The cohort of young people just going to university, which includes many of my friends' children and my eldest nephew, is, as usual, the target of accusations of degeneracy and warnings about dumbing-down.

In the past, such jeremiads generally concentrated on the moral aspect of things: in one of his rare moments of intemperance, the Roman poet Horace berated the young women of Rome for learning Greek dances (the provocative young minxes), the inevitable prelude to a later career of adultery. He was writing at a time when the Emperor Augustus had instigated one of those doomed back-to-basics campaigns promoting a return to "traditional values", only to find that his own daughter had been involved in a string of adulterous affairs.

When it comes to the current generation, the accusations centre less on moral looseness and more on an inability to concentrate, brought about by an addiction to computer games and the internet. The direst of the warnings has been issued by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, buttressed by research carried out by Gary Small, director of the Memory and Aging Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr Small argues that the very structure of people's brains has been changed by new media - to the extent, as Carr puts it, that "our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains shallow".

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 3, 2010 4:02 AM
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