THE Macintosh has a lot to answer for. The first time your correspondent clapped eyes on its graphical user interface (GUI), he realised the game was up. The use of icons instead of written words seemed the final admission that we had given up trying to read and write, and had entered a post-literate age.
According to Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation”, leisure reading among American 15-to-17-year-olds fell from 18 minutes a day in 1981 to seven in 2003.
Mark Federman of the McLuhan Programme in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, argued that the telegraph was the first to “undo” the effects of the written word.
when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.
clipped from: www.economist.com