Virtual Erudition

The Millennials have aged to the level that Boomers (my group) reached in the 1980s. Perhaps it’s time to reboot the TV show Thirtysomething for them. They are by no means old but already are disconcerted by having been displaced as the representatives of youth culture by Zoomers and Alphas, generations to which they do not entirely relate.
 
[Definitions: Boomers were born between and including 1946 and 1964, GenX 1965-1980, Millennials 1981-1996, GenZ (aka Zoomers) 1997-2010, and Alphas 2011 -present.]
 
A Millennial friend of mine the other day, feeling the changing of the guard, commented to me about how advanced kids are compared to when she was the same age. “They grew up with all this information at their fingertips. There are articles and YouTube videos on everything, so they just know so much more and are so much more sophisticated.” I disagreed and remarked that my admittedly limited experience with them was nothing so encouraging. She again pointed out the vast knowledge available to them. I didn’t wish to argue the matter so I let it go. Besides, it is true that answers (more or less correct ones generally) to almost any question are a few taps on a phone away, but there is a difference between virtual knowledge and knowledge. Being able to google something is not the same as internalizing the information. As far as sophistication goes, it is also true that kids (Alphas as well as Zoomers) are likely to be aware of the edgier cultural issues of the moment. But these are so much in the air as to be essentially pop culture – like knowing the names of the members of a popular band. (I was aware of the cultural issues of the ‘60s, too.) It’s a stretch to call this sophistication.
 
Every generation tends to underestimate previous ones, which is another way of saying they overestimate themselves. My generation was as guilty as any of that arrogance. I recall watching Casablanca years ago with a younger Boomer (b. 1961) who had never seen it because it was an “old movie” and therefore by definition boring. He liked it but then asked in all seriousness if I thought audiences back then “got” all the allusions, double entendres, and irony in the script, as though they couldn’t possibly be as sophisticated as ourselves given the primitive era in which they lived. “They got it,” was all I could say. Zoomers have much the same sort of reservations about Boomers given that by comparison we often remain a bit clunky with electronic devices.
 
I like having answers so readily available thanks to modern technology. I’m no Luddite. Yet there are drawbacks to everything, and the drawbacks to tech affect Zoomers and Alphas the most given their immersion in it and reliance on it. Henry Kissinger in his latest book (my review is a couple of posts ago) worried about this: “While the internet and its attendant innovations are unquestionably technical marvels, close attention must be paid to the balance between the constructive and corrosive habits of mind encouraged by new technology.” He noted the decline of “deep literacy” amid visual culture and quick clicks from link to link: “reading a complex book carefully, and engaging with it critically, has become as counter-cultural an act as was memorizing an epic poem in the earlier print-based age.”
 
I do not know, since Henry doesn’t mention it, but because he uses some of the same terminology I suspect that he is familiar with a book from around a decade ago by Nicolas Carr called The Shallows. Carr examined the question of whether relying on virtual knowledge and virtual memory was making us weak-minded. The answer was a qualified “yes.” Referencing numerous psychological studies, he reported that the internet diminished the time spent “deep reading.” We skim. We follow links, flitting about and often losing track of our initial question. The more hyperlinks an online text contains, the lower is our comprehension of it when we are tested afterwards. Carr quotes T.S. Eliot about being “distracted from distraction by distraction,” which is precisely the kind of quote likely to be used by someone who has done deep reading. Creativity and insight largely involve connecting one piece of knowledge with another in a new way, something quite difficult when the pieces of knowledge aren’t in our own heads. Carr concludes, “What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.” We become shallower.

 
None of this is inevitable. Nothing prevents a YouTube junkie from reading Nietzsche or Camus cover-to-cover on the side. But it’s not a habit I commonly see in Alphas and Zoomers, though it’s possible I simply meet the wrong ones. On the upside, I suppose virtual knowledge is better than none at all.
 

Questions to random young people