To start off, this entire article is troubling. Every statistic that Hedges’s used is very startling. As surprising as these facts are to me, I have been aware of America’s illiteracy problem for quite some time. But I had no idea that it was this bad. It is easy to throw out percentage or fractional statistics, but what really surprised me was how Hedges said that presidential debates are slowing and becoming easy enough for a fifth grader to understand. It is also troubling to think that last year eighty percent of families in this nation did not buy one book. There is a good chance that within that eighty percent, there lays a child that will someday become a political leader.
Today, the majority of the United States is, “informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés” according to Hedges. Is this a result of the Internet once again? Carr informed us that there are many distractions available while surfing the Internet, causing our mind to jump from one thing to another. I think that the Internet is to blame. It seems as though the only way that people are informed now is mainly through visual and emotional connections to the subject matter. Political propaganda today uses pathos to persuade its audience as well as basic visual representations of things to get their point across instead of intellectual and statistical persuasion. Our society is starting to turn its focus towards the importance of appearance. It is easy to point the finger at the Internet, so I am. To me, it almost seems too obvious not to blame our Internet.
What is this saying about our society? How are we (as a generation) supposed to change this? What may this do to our country in the future?
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