Say what, Boston Globe?

[negativeview]

I came back to this ad-infested hell-hole to respond to an article recently posted to the Boston Globe. I may be getting old enough to no longer be in "this generation" (which is never defined), but age-ism still bugs me deeply.

The original article, entitled "8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation," is at this location if you are interested

Comments

[negativeview]

There is a certain amount of "don't know," for sure. There's also a certain amount of "don't care, but I do well in English class when I have to care." If you're talking about people that run real websites, I'll back the claim 110%. If you're talking about blogs, then I'm about 50% with you. If you, like the audience, are talking about MySpace, I'll tell you to find different haunts before you start complaining -- it's like complaining that you don't like nudity after you walk into a strip club and take out some singles.

"blatant typos and mistaken homonyms everywhere he looks online"

Where is he looking? I'm once again going to say that I'm out of the ordinary here, but the sites that I frequent are fairly low on the blatant violations of grammar. He names two sites in the entire article: myspace and Wikipedia. He says that Wikipedia is good (regarding grammar and whatnot) but wishes that it had some of the creativity of MySpace.

MySpace.

He's complaining about spelling and grammar, while admitting that he hangs out on MySpace, and praises it. Remeber when I said that websites are a gradient of their own? At the very bottom of the ladder is MySpace. On that site you may well get ridiculed for proper spelling.

It's straw man debating at its worst. I could just as easily say that his generation is a bunch of sexist, racist evil-doers. You know it's not hard to find collectives of old people who still cling to the ideals that were espoused during their youth (or even before, if they were raised by old-fashioned parents and not exposed to the real world much through their childhood).

I could conveniently ignore that most people the authors age are perfectly sane and just find one group of crackpots to discredit the entire generation.

But really I haven't seen a single study that has overcome the glaring flaw in the most commonly cited studies.

Our generation does score lower, on average, on things like exit exams. This much is true. However, our exit exams cover much more than they used to. My mother, who has a college degree, has willfully admitted to me that I took math in High School that was not required for her college degree. I have seen no study pitting this generation against the tests that were given the previous ones.

I'm not claiming that this generation is smarter. I'm not even claiming that this generation is as smart. I'm simply saying that the author is making intentionally inflammatory remarks in order to try and sell his book with an equally inflammatory title, all without a shred of real evidence to back it up.

I'll rise to the bait enough to contradict him (though I don't have nearly the audience that the Globe has given him) but he won't get me to buy the book.