Misinformation Age
GELERNTER, DAVID
Misinformation Age More computers, less learning. BY DAVID GELERNTER WE ARE SUPPOSED to be living in the "Information Age." If we are, exactly what topic are people so well-informed about? Video...
...So what's the truth about the Information Age...
...In the Information Age, it's easy for people to stick with the topics they know and love...
...Video games...
...At some point we will see a (sort-of) blog that does (in a bloggish sort of way) what the New Yorker did in the 1930s and '40s...
...You'd have thought Cybersphere criticism would be nearly as well developed as literary criticism by now...
...We've heard about it for years: "narrowcast-ing" as opposed to broadcasting...
...Maybe they don't even see it...
...But, of course, many of those who would love to stamp out all traces of public religion would also love to see the country deteriorate into a messy mass of separate subcultures...
...Two good developments are all but inevitable...
...Their left-wing bias is blatant...
...The networks had a unifying effect on American culture...
...New pieces will appear every day, around the clock...
...I'm certainly not...
...It's true that some schools have made sound educational use of computers and software...
...Of course the cybersphere is brand new, and things are bound to change...
...The pattern is obvious in the cable TV explosion (made possible by digital electronics...
...that expands instead of narrows a person's viewpoint...
...It's unfair to expect computers and the web to fix what the schools have broken...
...the authors don't even try to hide it...
...College-preparatory math had been making steady progress...
...Returning to young people (the cultural climate affects young people most)—either the Information Age is real, and they would be even less well-informed without it (which is hard to picture...
...And this issue is important...
...Before that there were other sorts of magazines and, of course, books...
...On the other hand, the Bush administration, the Democrats, and all the world's intelligence services were poorly informed about Iraqi WMDs...
...Many such web projects are already underway and doing fine...
...In consequence, serious math teaching has made no progress but has (at least) held its own...
...Second: Search engines are riding high, but they solve only half the problem...
...In the United States, with its hugeness and ethnic hodgepodge, there have always been powerful centrifugal forces just beneath the surface...
...But my guess is that, on balance, American schools would do better if they junked their Macs and PCs and let students fool around somewhere else...
...History has (predictably) been much harder hit...
...It's easy to watch nothing but fashion and gardening shows, or the news 24 hours a day...
...But it's clear what the web's most important contribution to a well-informed public will be...
...Those who are eager to grind under heel (like cigarette butts) every manifestation of religion in public life should keep in mind that Judeo-Christian religion and the Bible have, traditionally, been the most important unifying forces in American life...
...Before long there will be websites that let you flip through dozens of other sites as easily as you flip through a magazine's pages...
...But after a certain point, it becomes clear that each hour you spend this way is more apt to decrease than increase your store of knowl-edge—when you consider the other things you might be doing instead...
...The same experts who know for sure that we are in mid-Information Age take it for granted that young people are colossally uninformed...
...Of course it makes some people better informed, in some areas...
...Schools should be telling students to read books, not play with computers...
...The coalition war effort would have been radically different without networks and digital electronics...
...Eventually we will get over the idea that playing with computers and the Internet is inherently virtuous...
...Abraham Lincoln famously remarked that Uncle Tom's Cabin caused the Civil War...
...Although every few months, the rumor pops up that they were all relocated to Syria...
...Consider the Information Age in the context of the dominant news story of recent years, the Iraq war...
...Except what they've learned by themselves, or their parents have taught them...
...For years people have discussed narrowcasting and its side effects...
...or it's a fraud and has failed to help or actually made things worse...
...There is remarkably little commentary on the Cybersphere beyond consumer-level recommendations...
...They will soon be turned loose on the world as aspiring young scholars...
...His book on Americanism is due to be published by Doubleday in 2006...
...It's true that Iraq was and is an Information Age war...
...If you know what you're looking for, they help you find it...
...It's easy to read blogs that all focus on the same topic...
...Most people who visit Iraq nowadays remark when they get home that Americans are poorly informed about the situation on the ground...
...Endless illustrations are available, but take just one for concreteness...
...TV watchers have hundreds of channels to choose from...
...First: There's one specialized field that draws a broad instead of narrow audience...
...Is it (perhaps) normal for U.S...
...Consider the contrast between mathematics and history...
...And young people are more likely than anyone else to spend long hours beating their way happily through the dense, trackless electronic jungle...
...They grow up with computers, the web, cell phones, hundreds of cable TV channels, and digital electronics in countless forms...
...Recently, a graduate student at a major research university told me that she knew doctoral candidates in humanities departments who had never heard of (for example) Devil's Island and the Dreyfus Affair...
...It isn't...
...Of course, the heyday of the TV networks themselves only lasted three decades C50s-'70s...
...This sort of unifying cultural force no longer exists...
...The most important solution to the problematic Information Age has nothing to do with the web...
...Information-Agers who don't know what good prose is will be dazzled and won over...
...Today most incoming college students don't seem to know any history at all...
...We don't have that information...
...But what's the overall pattern...
...Each will be lucidly written and precisely, beautifully edited...
...But people don't only want to search, they want to browse...
...Is it true...
...By the 1960s, good colleges had cut out teaching any math course bel^'w calculus...
...it can be profitable if you're lucky, but do it on your own time...
...In the late '60s, math-teaching moved a step higher: High schools started teaching calculus, and smart college freshmen routinely enrolled in second-year calculus courses...
...But that doesn't mean we have to take it as it is and like it and keep quiet...
...I have two boys, and the three of us are capable of sitting still for any number of World War II documentaries on cable TV...
...College-preparatory math classes have been relatively undamaged...
...everyone else) were badly informed...
...He was kidding...
...Since then, modern educational techniques have worked an outright miracle...
...As information channels become cheaper to build and operate, they are able to concentrate profitably on narrower ranges of material...
...Others just watch, read, or hear the same story (with minor variations) over and over and over—and grow less likely every month to meet with anything new...
...Before the TV networks, there were radio networks and mass-market picture magazines...
...websites and blogs have been this way from the start: Most successful blogs cover one topic in depth (or anyway, at length...
...We can all agree that American public schools are a joke, and are more responsible than anything else for rising levels of public ignorance...
...You can be superbly well-informed about Iraq if you follow the right websites...
...but not entirely...
...Before World War II, most incoming college freshmen weren't prepared for calculus...
...culture to lack unifying influences...
...Schools ought to take the same line on web-browsing as they do on poker...
...Web-based schools will enormously expand our educational options, and make it much easier than it is today to circumvent educationally corrupt local schools...
...Today most public high schools offer essentially the same math sequences they did a generation ago...
...People will read for the sheer joy of reading...
...History teaching has been raked by heavy fire from ed-school ideologues for several decades...
...And leading Democrats presuppose a second layer of misinformation: When they accuse the administration of misleading the nation about WMDs, they assume that the public is badly informed about the extent to which the Democrats (along with David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Since then, progress has stopped...
...The high school history textbooks favored by public schools here in southern Connecticut are pathetic...
...in fact, for any number of "The P-47 in the European Air War, 1943" documentaries...
...But many people have not been so informed...
...You could count on loads of people having seen the same junk you had...
...It will publish paragraphs and short pieces on any topic, from no particular ideological angle...
...most are one-topic channels or movie channels...
...as easily as you browse lots of magazines at a newsstand...
...And the networks used to cover presidential nominating conventions, major presidential speeches and press conferences, big public events like space shots, and so on...
...It is fair to ask whether the digital jungle has made things better or worse...
...In the pre-cable days, there were only three TV networks, and a large proportion of all TV watchers would be tuned into one of them...
...Some people grow better and better informed about their topics of choice...
...Each one teaches us a little more...
...History teaching has fallen to pieces...
...Namely, beautiful prose...
...In the early 1970s, many good students took a year-long college-level ("Advanced Placement") survey course in modern European history, and another in American history...
...Few of us are immune to the temptations...
...We can't abolish the Cybersphere, and few people would choose to...
...The more carefully we ponder the facts, the more unsettling they become...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 16
