The following excerpt is from an interview with poet Dana Gioia that was, but is no longer, on the Fact and Arts website of the BBC, I think more than ten years ago. Gioia has been Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. I’m sorry I can no longer link to the whole interview, but I think this small part is worthwhile.
F&A: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.
Dana Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously.
Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.
Gladsome Lights 
The culture of reading needs to be nurtured from an early age – I know you have done it with your children and grandchildren – so that it becomes a joy rather than a chore. Being able to absorb chunks of prose with ease allows the reader to consider it, chew over it and – in the case of news reports rather than fiction – weigh up the veracity of it.
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That comment is spot on. A sad thing, too. So many are reduced to the “see it fast, read it fast, text it fast.” They don’t know how to write and I fear if it keeps up, they won’t know how to read…
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Good food for thought! Thank-you! I just read this to my children during our breakfast meal which includes a morsel of mind, heart, and soul food (usually a moral or current events story, piece of poetry or Bible verse).
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Our culture can only be dumber if the population is, too. But I’m sure he means, and so do I, that the people aren’t more stupid, but that they’re not challenged in school and they don’t learn to try to excel. As a result, the culture suffers.
The way my laptop is set up, if I click on the temperature on the lower section of the screen, some “news” on msnbc pops up. The articles are so poorly written! So un-researched! It’s appalling, and to think that people read this and take it for fact. Very disturbing.
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How true! And of blogs, as well. When I first started, no one had images. You had to find a site that would host your photos (Photo Bucket was among the first I’d used) and link it. I’d chosen one of very few blogging hosts (now defunct) that would allow 10mb of images.
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