Last week in class we watched an interview with Mark Bauerlein an English professor at Emory University and author of the book “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)”. In the interview Bauerlein argues that today students are extremely affected by digital culture. Instead of opening the world for young people new media gives them what they really care about – access to other teenagers, to their peer group.

As a result of the high priority that social networks take up in young people’s lives, experiences like the visit of a museum or a library have tremendously gone down. On the one hand students complain about not having time for anything because they are so busy while on the other hand they are still able to watch more than 2 hours of TV a day (latest ratings), check their facebook profiles and call friends.

So the question arises if the author is right about his thesis that young people are that much affected by multi media today or if he is exaggerating the situation?

There is no doubt that today multi media such as the internet plays a significant role in our society and therefore influences our lives every day. Especially young people that have grown up with the possibility of using the internet where- and whenever they need to might not be able to understand that someone like Bauerlein raises the fear that the overuse of new media might have a bad influence on them.

But would we understand his point? Although Bauerlein definitely has a point here it seems to me that he extremely generalizes young people´ s exposure to the new media. When talking about young children that are not interested anymore in reading a book or visiting an exhibition, we need to consider that they have grown up in a completely different world than our parents or even our grandparents did. Even when we were younger the use of the internet did not play such an important role like it does today.

It may be doubted that, had the internet being used 50 years ago that young people at that time would have used it in a more responsible way. It is not really useful to adhere rigidly to the “old times” where young kids were playing outside all the time, climbing on trees and getting tanned by the sun. Our society has changed we cannot deny that!

What we as former teachers need to do is being a role model for our students helping them to find new form of literacy. Bauerlein is right when saying that mentors are extremely important in young people´ s lives as they need someone to tell them about the great big world out there. But everybody needs to be mentor…parents, teachers, grandparents etc.

What young children really need to learn is how to use the internet and new media effectively as it seems to me that a lot of them are just overstrained. Especially young kids have to be lead to a responsible handling with the use of internet, TV and co.

I hope that our course “Neue Medien im FU” will deliver us a detailed insight into the effective exposure to the internet. As a former teacher it is necessary to teach students how important and powerful the use of the internet can be referring to the literal infinity of subjects.