BFTP: Is everything making me stoopid(er)?

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post, July 30, 2008.

Some days it takes all the courage one can muster just to drive into crime-ridden Mankato, MN: 

From this morning's paper:

Mooning suspect remains at large

A pepper-spray-wielding woman who sprayed a bar bouncer after mooning police officers early Tuesday remains at large. 

Police were called to Choppers on South Front Street about 1 a.m. to report that a woman was causing problems in the bar.

The woman reportedly stepped outside the bar, dropped her pants, and displayed her buttocks to officers passing by in a squad car. The officers apparently didn’t notice. When the bouncer chastised the woman for her behavior and attempted to remove her from the premises, she took a pepper spray container from her purse and sprayed the bouncer’s face and the bar area. Then she took off running. 

The only description given of the woman is that she is heavyset.

"Heavyset?" That doesn't exactly narrow down the set of suspects around here. 

Has anyone else noticed that newspapers are getting thinner - in width, in length, and especially in depth? News magazines like Time and Newsweek (print is now gone, gone, gone) are getting thinner on editorial content. NPR and CNN are now catering to our sub-five minute attention spans. Most movies seem to run about 90 minutes instead of two hours and critics complain when they run "long" - and any scene that runs more than ten seconds slows the pace. I am not holding my breath hoping for a political debate where participants could actually treat issues in depth.

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic asks "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Motoko Rich asks in the NYT's article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading," if reading on the Internet is the cause of poor reading test scores.  I've worried about my change in reading habits for some time.

If the snippitization of information was made popular by Internet sites, it has certainly gotten a good deal of help from the regular media. 

OK, here it comes. You KNOW I couldn't resist...

In response to last week's post "Are We Teaching Kids to Hate Reading", I received this comment via Google+:

Everything currently written is garbage. ... But I believe that what [kids] are reading, blogs, twitter, poorly done no?  They are used to garbage.  Hand them Melville and they won't read it.  Plus, I think rap music has much to do with their taste in words."

Those words made me wonder if posts deploring the changes in communication, loss of taste, and/or decline in quality of media aren't just a symptom of a younger generation's tastes superseding an older generation's.

My parents thought I read crap (comic books, Mad magazine, Tarzan, Heinlein, etc. - what my professor G. Robert Carlson at the U of Iowa charitably called "sub-literature."  Rock and roll was as obnoxious to them as rap is to me today.  I would say we ought to be careful in damning formats rather than content. I've read some nice stuff in blogs and crap in books and magazines. Twitter, chat, text messaging I don't think were ever intended as art forms ;-)