The Layoff Beard

Extended Thought ▪ We’re Getting Dumber As A Society

By Matt Sussman | Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

---

I hear the following sentiments all the time: People are getting dumber. We’re becoming more depraved. The Internet is ruining journalism. Before you know it, Idiocracy will no longer be a work of fiction.

Maybe it’s because of our dependence on technology and how much time we escape into the digital cloth. It’s true, all those glowing rectangles are quite amazing but ever-present in our lives. Could we, as a society, be losing the important quality of human contact because of our iPhones, tweets, Facebooks quizzes, and DVR? Do GPS systems help us lose our sense of direction and know where we’re really going?

Well, maybe. I used to be able to remember important phone numbers before I had a cell phone that could store them. Actually, wait, what’s a cell phone for anymore? Nowadays I can just tweet to my friends. I think I’ve forgotten how to dial altogether.

Dependence on technology is one thing. Yes, we’re probably a little too immersed in bits and bytes. But does that translate to intelligence? I’m no fan of “c u l8r” speak, and any grown man over 30 who writes e-mails like that should probably get a few slaps across the face with an unabridged dictionary. But I have trouble seeing how websites and TV shows that cater to the lowest common denominator are dumbing us down.

I see the logic, though. If planned premise television was thrown out the window, and shows about fat single girls trying to find boyfriends were replaced by something with something slightly more redeeming in value, we’d be a smarter society. But the thing is, there are already lots of shows on Discovery and The Science Channel and A&E pertaining to very interesting, highly sophisticated topics. When it comes to politics, NPR and BBC aren’t going away any time soon.

Text messaging and the Internet destroyed societal intelligence. Sure. They said the same thing about the television, rock music, radio, and perhaps the moving picture. Hell, I’m sure they had that same logic about the light bulb, the printing press, heliocentrism, and the wheel. (”You mean to say you need to CARVE a smooth object to get across that meadow because you ain’t smart enough to use your own feet? What have we become?”)

It’s pretty safe to assume that all those 2,000 comments at the end of any banal YouTube video were penned by toothless troglodytes who have walls covered in feces and keep running into the door because they forgot about the doorknob … which is also covered in feces. But 50, 200, 500 years ago, the common man never really wrote in front of the whole world. I suspect if a medieval kingdom’s peasants all wrote a letter to the lord expressing their views on the new tithing system, someone somewhere is going to call the lord a fag, and another person would compare the new tithing system to something Hitler would have done. And come to think of it, most of those peasants probably did have walls covered in feces.

I have to ask, when people say we’re getting dumber: what’s your reference point? When was the smartest year in the history of the world? Was it before or after the discovery of nanotechnology? If society’s getting dumb, are you referring to the aptitude of the 99th percentile, or the average ordinary citizen?

The discovery of idiocy kind of precedes everything else. There was always that caveman who thought it was a smart idea to yank on the mountain lion’s tail (hey, he was curious, plus he had good reason to think that’s how you start a fire), and the rest of the onlookers learned from it. (”Okay, no pulling on mountain lion’s tails. Your face will become mountain lion hors d’oeurves.”) Of course, there was that one cynical caveman, who worked in IT, that remained convinced mankind wouldn’t survive because people got eaten by mountain lions.

Let’s not focus on the stupidity and assume we’re doomed. Focusing on stupidity, if nothing else, makes us feel better about our own goof-ups, such as the time I … such as the time someone told the airport security guard he didn’t have a gun when the guard actually asked him if he had any gum. Nah, we’ll be okay. And if not, we just wait a few billion years, and the next generation of intelligent life will realize that their ancestors invented flavored dental floss.