What's Wrong With Kids These Days?

I feel like the age old lament of where did we go wrong with the current generation is at the heart of both of our readings this week.

The sexist and ageist commentary Riley put out there made it easy for me to discount anything he has to say. I think Lessing has a good point: a classical liberal arts education is not valued in North America the way it once was. We are as a result less educated about our own cultural history. My dad is frequently horrified at how little I know of classical music and literature and blames my schooling for my gaps. Riley writes:

Whilst it may be easy to mock the utterances of hundreds of millions of bloggers
and social networking site users, the 21st century will be remembered as the
time that communication was democratized, a time where the power of a few was
replaced by the power of many.

Didn't we say that about the Gutenberg Press too? That worked out well in the long run. If we allow the big telcos to compromise Net Neutrality, and don't protect our Internet, we could now be in the golden age of democratized online communications. In the future, the fast Internet will be for huge publishing conglomerates willing and able to pay for fast throughput (much like wide print distribution of today), and the rest of our communiques rendered online equivalents of leaflets and brochures taped to telephone poles because of intentionally throttled bandwidth.

Keen's article is interesting because he looks at authority and expertise, and where those things come from. As I tweeted this week, I love that I can quickly and cheaply see what my good friends think about a topic, and also see what the NY Times, CNN and random blogger wackos are writing about it. I value the diversity of opinion, and try to keep myself from insulating myself amongst writers of a single point of view.

For instance, up until right after I'd confirmed that I was pregnant, I was pretty sure that what I wanted was loads of painkillers, hospital setting, yada yada for my birth experience. Then when all of a sudden it was going to be real, and I was really responsible for this new little human, I thought some people are really against medications for childbirth. I started doing a bit of reading, and found that when you have an epidural, you're effectively paralyzed from the waist down. That's not cool. So I kept reading, and found a lot of reasons, largely selfish ones, for choosing natural childbirth (at least that's the plan, if all goes well). If I didn't have access to all of this diversity of opinion, I might not have found it so easy to come to my own decision and feel like I really owned it.

So I don't buy that the Internet makes you stupider - I think it's a lot of other stuff, cultural, curricular, community related things - and it, like Twitter, is what you make of it. You can hang out in the ghettos of myspace and nexopia, and compare notes on your drug consumption, or you can participate in a community of ideas and thought.

Where do you find intelligent and thoughtful discussion on the Internet? Let's have some link love! My bookmarks are available at http://delicious.com/xxcaro - be warned that there are a lot of childbirth and breastfeeding links there, if that's going to make you uncomfortable. My bookmarks don't necessarily contain only intelligent and thoughtful discussions, but I've bookmarked them for some reason or another...