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An interview with Mark Bauerlein

By Ruth Douillette

Mark Bauerlein doesn’t pull any punches in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Speaking in a clarion voice, empowered by extensive research and statistics, he writes of a generation so captivated by technology—email, computer, cell phones, video games—that it’s lost its intellectual edge.

The young are as intellectually capable as any generation, he insists, but they have narrowed their field of focus to the immediacy of social contact and entertainment on their electronic devices, and lost sight of their place in the larger scheme of history. This is a problem for the future of our country, Bauerlein says. When there is no sense of the past, there can be little hope for the future.

After reviewing The Dumbest Generation for the October 2008 issue of the Internet Review of Books, I was pleased when author Mark Bauerlein agreed to a follow-up phone interview. This provocative book has continued to elicit interest—the paperback version will be published in May.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel talking to the man who called my kids dumb. And not just my kids, but a whole generation of young people between the ages of 15 and 30. He himself expects to be called a curmudgeon, he’d written, and so I envisioned him stern, humorless, and a tad grumpy. The sort of man who speaks haughtily of things “back in my day.”

The arrangement for the phone interview was made, but when the appointed time came and went with no call, I discovered an email from Mark: Please send me your phone number again, it said.

He couldn’t find it in the clutter of his email, an image that left me smiling. Who’s calling who dumb? I thought, with an ironic chuckle.

“Thank goodness for email technology.” I couldn’t resist the subtle poke, when he called.

And he laughed—a decidedly uncurmudgeonly laugh.

And perhaps the overload of Bauerlein’s email helps make his point. Email is undeniably a time thief, and time spent on email, or the Internet, or texting, or Facebook, is time not spent reading or doing other important things—a problem in Bauerlein’s eyes, and one he himself deals with.

Bauerlein says that when he needs to get some reading done he leaves his office. “The pull of the Internet, blogs, email, and other distractions is hard to fight. I can’t resist them,” he admits.

So how can he berate youth for finding itself in the same bind?

The fact is, he doesn’t. His empathy and understanding are clear in person, if not in his book, where he is intent on making a case that technology has not lived up to its promise of a better educated generation, and instead has snatched the minds of the young, distracting them from things equally, and perhaps, more important.

Here’s the thing. Bauerlein isn’t a grumpy old man railing at today’s youth. He isn’t an old man at all. A forty-something father of a four-year-old, Jack, he has his hands full raising a son surrounded by the same hypnotic technology that stakes its claim on all of us.

“I get a lot of angry email from kids,” he says. “Many start, ’You are an @$$.’“ Bauerlein says he’s glad to see they are “paying attention, and care enough to defend themselves.” He’ll concede their points, he says, but challenges them to make their case without lapsing into profanity.

“A lot of young people write to me this way. Technology plays into that response,” Bauerlein believes. “Email gives them a quick outlet for their emotions.” He sees the angry epithets as a way of making sure he’s paying attention.

Rather than being defensive, Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, takes time to listen. “For a 17 year-old,” he says, “there are few things worse than thinking [adults] don’t care. I take their remarks seriously.”

He believes in the “dehumanizing” element of technology. While it isn’t, of itself, “the enemy,” he sees the “seduction and temptation” of email and text messaging as something that plays to the deep social need inherent in humans.

Bauerlein maintains that the ability to always be connected via technology is not a good thing. When he was 16, he went to school, played basketball afterward, and then sat down to dinner, his social life ended for the day. Maybe the phone would ring, but there was a limit to social connectedness—a good thing, he thinks.

Technology cranks up the social pressure for today’s teens. “There is no down time. They always wonder, is someone texting? Do I have a message? Social factors are always in play now,” he says.

He sees students every day. “They don’t have joy on their faces,” he says. “There’s concern.”

The following is a follow-up email Q&A.

I’ve seen so many comments about your book, from informal blog comments and blog reviews, to formal reviews. Are you surprised at the response your book has elicited?

Yes, the volume of response has been surprising, as has the length of time. I’m still doing media spots (BBC last week, C-Span this week...) and the book came out seven months ago. That’s gratifying, and it means that it’s not about the book itself, but about the issue.

Everyone wants to know what’s going on with the kids and their tools, and amidst all the hype they sense a problem. My book, I would hope, identifies some dangers.

How do you feel about the negative response? Did you expect that? Have you alienated or irritated any of your colleagues?

Well, Ruth, if you do a book with that kind of title and subtitle, you better be prepared for some heat. Apart from that, one realizes that many, many people have big investments in digital technology and the young—personal, professional, and financial. Just think of all the technology consultants in schools whose livelihood depends upon the assumption that without laptops at every desk, the school and the kids will suffer. People get touchy when so much is riding on the issue, and it makes it so that the issue can’t be handled in objective, evidence-based terms. That’s why we need more pushback from disinterested parties.

As for my colleagues, well, I already seem to be such an odd figure to them that their response to the book has been near universal silence. I’m odd because I worked outside academia, and I have no intention of devoting my labors to humanities scholarship that will be read by all of a dozen people.

Is there any aspect of the book that you feel is misunderstood? Anything you now wish to explain differently or clarify now that you’ve seen the response?

I wish I had played up the intense social meaning of the tools a little more, and played the ignorance issue down a bit. The real advent here is the kids now have an unprecedented amount of social contact with one another, and the intensification of social life has intellectual costs.

You said you chose the title, the publisher didn’t. Obviously it was picked to be provocative and spark sales. In retrospect do you think the title raises hackles so that people miss your intended message?

Sometimes, yes, but the goal was to get the message out, to make it onto the radar of the press so that the dominance of technophiles was broken. We haven’t gone that far, but I think we can say that “technology and kids” is covered by the media with a slightly less enthusiastic tone, and a note of skepticism is now not unusual.

The paperback version of The Dumbest Generation is coming out mid-May? Have you made any changes—additions, deletions, or change of emphasis?

I added a preface that reflects on the impact of the book. It is this: The Dumbest Generation joins a half-dozen other books (by Nicholas Carr, Lee Siegel, Maggie Jackson, Andrew Keen) to insert a healthy note of skepticism into public discussion of the digital age.

We have, I think, revised the general take on it, and reporters doing stories on Web 2.0 stuff now take the skeptical viewpoint more into account. In a word we’ve blunted the digiti-philia, the techno-enthusiasm.

One of your contentions in The Dumbest Generation was that the pull of technology makes it difficult for the young to escape the social call and find time to delve into intellectual pursuits. While I might agree—I’ve felt the pull of email and the cell phone—what is the solution now that these tools are so prevalent?

Oh, yes, I feel them, too. If I have to read something longer than ten pages, I just leave my office and go to an unconnected spot. I myself can’t resist the lure of email, news alerts, the UCLA sports blog . . . The solution is to recognize the irresistibility of it all and get away from it temporarily.

Is there any current research on the effects of technology on intelligence? Or on thinking, at least? The rewiring of the brain?

I’ve seen some stories recently about neuroscientists beginning to study some long-term effects of social networking and heavy screen time. It’s still new and uncertain, but more of them are raising doubts about various forms of brain and personality development in this new techno-social space.

Raising doubts about what exactly? Doubts that brains are being rewired by interactions with technology? Doubts that brains are affected, or doubts that they aren’t?

The doubts are to be put in the context of all the hype we’ve been hearing for so many years about the miracles and wonders of the digital advent. Remember Time Magazine’s person of the year a couple of years ago? It was “you.” Everyone has been so empowered, has been given a voice through Web 2.0, that we are all persons of the year now.

Or [think of] all the educators who speak about how digital technology is revolutionizing education, allowing people to learn and do in ways never imagined before. Anybody who raised doubts about those possibilities was a Luddite, a crank, a downer.

Well, the great leap forward hasn’t happened. And what empowerment has done is turn millions of teens into texting fanatics. We reached a point last year at which people wondering about the benefits of digital tools, or blaming them for poor educational achievement and workplace skills, couldn’t be dismissed. That’s the transformation. Our arguments against digital tools have to be taken seriously. A few years ago they could be ignored or stigmatized.

Are you raising Jack to be an “intellectual child?” How are you balancing all of life’s offerings—social, intellectual, and technological?

We’ve given in to about an hour of screen time each day (Caillou, Curious George . . .), and I just try to balance that with at least an hour of reading time each day (Richard Scarry, Beatrix Potter . . .).

I think that if parents focus on providing at least an hour a day of reading plus an hour a day of conversation, discussion, Q&A, and the like, we can limit the avalanche of digital diversions and youth mass culture in their lives.

Describe the ideal life you’d envision for your son, if it were within your ability to control it. How much do you, or will you, try to control all the distractions in his life as he gets older?

We want him to be an avid reader, to have an inquisitive temperament, to exercise the discipline that comes with athletics, and to recognize the power of ideas. He can choose any career or profession he wants, so long as he works into his life the habits that make for an informed citizen and a discerning consumer—reading books, discussing ideas and values, studying art.

How’s your wife handling all the chat about the book? Or is it business as usual?

Ah, business as usual, I think. I was going to dedicate the book to her, but when she saw the title and subtitle, she backed off. I understand. She sometimes worries about the hate mail I’ve gotten, but it’s tapered off to angry missives coming only two or three a month.

Open forum . . . anything else?

Only to say that the years of high school and college are unique ones in that they are, for most people, the only time of life to read great books, see and hear great art, and discuss big ideas with people who can help them through. The more time they spend on Facebook at age 18, the less time they spend learning a foreign language, practicing a musical instrument, reading about the cold war, and memorizing Emily Dickenson’s poems. The opportunity is brief, and it’s a sad outcome for young people to pass those years on the puerile diversions of Twitter.

Do you have another book planned? Can you share the topic?

My agent and the editor are pushing for a book on what to do about the problem. I’m kicking around titles such as The Intellectual Teen: A Guide For Parents.

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If you’re going to call an entire generation dumb, then you better have thick skin. Mark Bauerlein does. And it’s gotten thicker in the months since The Dumbest Generation was published. And of course he never really meant that the generation was dumb. Just that technology’s glitzy promise hasn’t made it smarter.

His message is a good one, I think. He doesn’t say it this way, exactly, but: everything in moderation. A cup of conversation, stirred with a book. Add a dash of culture and a pinch of social-tech. Mix well and enjoy.

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Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop where she’s an administrator for the Practice group. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.

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