In three weeks of traveling and more than a hundred different media interviews and other appearances, I've heard and seen three specters universally invoked from one end of the country to the other: the danger of new technology, the ubiquity of pornography, and the "dumbing down" of the young.
Each day, my publisher sends me a fax of the TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine interviews and speaking schedule for my book tour. Taking notes for the writing of these rants during my book tour, I've checked each appearance after I've finished and marked the major concerns that were raised about media, culture, and technology. Every few days, I stuff the sheets in a white envelope.
Before heading for Canada Monday, I read them all over. I suppose I shouldn't have been, but I was astonished.
Aside from a San Francisco newspaper interview, I have yet to make one appearance where pornography and its transmission by new media wasn't raised, usually more than once. No wonder politicians talk of little else.
And there was only a handful of interviews, talk shows, or public appearances where the term "dumbing down" wasn't used, always in reference to the young and always in the context of TV, movies, advertising, and computers.
America's fixation on the spread of pornography and sexual imagery is amazing - and oddly schizophrenic, given that pornography is now an $8 billion industry in America, according to US News & World Report. It's as if half the country is buying this stuff, the other half condemning its existence.
Almost as ubiquitous - and blatantly stated by interviewers, TV anchors, boomer parents, liberal intellectuals, right-wing attack panelists, teachers, parents, and anonymous callers - was the notion that the American young are valueless, apathetic, and culturally impaired.
American kids are the last free-fire zone for cultural bigots, opportunistic politicians, and journalists, who no longer talk to people but only to their self-interested spokespeople. Although many other social, demographic, and ethnic groups - women, African Americans, the Irish, Italians, gays and lesbians, Native Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Jews - have at one time or another been stereotyped as shiftless, valueless, or lazy, these groups have all amassed some measure of political power and challenged - often legally, sometimes violently, frequently politically - police, government, or media stereotyping or persecution of them.
But the young have few rights. They remain the only distinct social group almost completely at the mercy of others. No other group in American life is seen as entitled to none of the respect and sensitivity won by almost everyone else. The notion of individual liberty, extended slowly from the Enlightenment through the French and American revolutions, is gradually encompassing almost every group except the young, especially teenagers. This is demonstrated every day in political speeches and journalistic reports.
"So you reject the idea that the young have been dumbed down by media?" a New York City radio interviewer asked me incredulously last Thursday. I do, I said. College-bound SATs are the highest in decades, I said. But statistics are so overused as to be meaningless. The fact is, I know too many smart kids to believe that they're dumber than my generation.
Sure, he laughed, but everybody knows they made the SAT test easier. And every teacher knows, he said, that kids are lazier, ruder, and less cultured than they used to be.
In city after city on my book tour, teachers used the term "dumbed down" to describe their students, parents used it to describe their own children, attack panelists used it to criticize the impact of new media and popular culture on the "moral" fabric of the country. This notion is so far from my own experience, at home, online, while tutoring in a public school system, and has been repeated to me so often and with such conviction, that it has seemed to me more and more that I'm the one out of touch with reality. But it's never made any sense to me.
Now, a massive study of youth attitudes, values, and lifestyles directly challenges the libel perpetrated by politicians and journalists that contemporary adults are inherently more intelligent than and morally superior to their children.
"Most American parents do not realize how eager to learn, enterprising, and forward-thinking their teenaged children are as they face the new millennium," says Elissa Moses, managing director of the highly respected New York-based BrainWaves Group, which has just published "The New World Teen Study."
The study is based on interviews with 27,600 teenagers aged 15 to 18 in 44 countries. In the United States, the survey questioned 2,800 high school students on questions ranging from worries to expectations about the future.
"Teens in America work harder than their counterparts anywhere else in the world," the survey found. "More hold jobs (58 percent) and do housework regularly (69 percent). If anything, found Moses, America's kids have all the pressures of adult responsibilities without the benefit of coping mechanisms that come with experience. More than 74 per cent say they enjoy learning, and 66 percent "definitely" plan to go to college.
Moses, a "trend" expert hired by some of America's biggest and most influential companies - including Coca-Cola, Nike, MTV, Calvin Klein, and General Motors - found that the family is "held near and dear by today's American youth. The family is as important a driving principle as is the race for achievement and technology." Moses said her study found no evidence for the myth that American teenagers are unmotivated. "With this generation," she found, "adults have as much to learn from their children regarding dealing with technology, change, and uncertainty, as they have to learn from us."
Moses said many of the finds of the "New World Teen Study" debunk popular misconceptions about American teenagers, stereotypes I can testify personally are epidemic in both politics and media.
For example, the myth that teens are alienated from parents and families. Teens say the single most important thing to them is their relationship with their families, according to the BrainWaves study. Their single major source of worry: their parents' health (63 percent).
Or the myth that teens care about nothing but fun. In truth, found Moses, the Number One worry of teenagers is getting a good job, and their Number One expectation is completing their education.
It's obvious that many American kids, particularly those struggling with weak family structures, poverty, disintegrating public schools, and other social problems, have enormous social, behavioral, and attitudinal problems, few of which have anything to do with being dumbed down by TV shows or movies.
But politicians, with the enthusiastic help of a gullible and docile media, have advanced for years the stereotype of the irresponsible, apathetic American teenager made ignorant, socially disconnected, hostile, and violent by years of rock and roll, rap, TV, movies, and lately, the biggest bugaboo ever, the Internet. It has always seemed to me - the tour has only strengthened the feeling - that this hostility toward the young has less to do with educational concerns than with control, in the same way that the clucking about our civic fabric coming out of Washington has less to with morality than power. The Internet is the antithesis of control. It redistributes power and undermines control. The young are caught in the middle of the political upheaval over information - who gets how much of it.
Studies of violence and social disorder among the young have never borne out the notion that pop culture is de-civilizing the users of new media and technology or making them stupid. The BrainWaves study, in fact, supports the notion of a moral young, with a strong work ethic and a rock-solid values system. This group is of special interest to the digital world. They are the ascending citizenry of the digital nation. Nearly 85 percent of them use computers, and 24 percent regularly access the Internet.
These teenagers are not in need of having narrow, unyielding, and suffocating notions of culture and learning rammed down their throats. They are in need of liberation from the offensive stereotyping of nitwit politicians and clueless journalists. The young have been told they're ignorant and de-civilized so often that many believe it.
Two hundred years ago, Thomas Paine wrote that every generation has the right to determine its own culture. This is as true now as it was then.
American kids are, in fact, determining their own culture, despite their elders. That they are doing this on their own is powerful testimony to exactly who is being dumbed down.
