By Jaime Ortega.
The Hypodermic Needle Model suggests, “An intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.” In other words the “receivers” are those who watch television non stop and are shock waved by the Internet’s powerhouses.
A lot of what you download to your brain is what you actually store inside your head. And most Internet and television users are not getting the right information stored, or at least they choose not to acquire it.
Erin Jackson posted on the New York Times that, “our dependence upon technology has played a huge part in our endumbening.”
“We don’t memorize phone numbers anymore. We’ve forgotten how to use maps and compute basic math problems,” Jackson wrote.
Well memory perhaps is what is making our politicians more credible. (That’s a joke,)
To begin let’s ask five basic questions. If you use Google, you lose. If you fail one question, you have a serious educational issue.
1) What is our neighboring galaxy?
2) What country did Christopher Columbus land on in his first accidental trip to the Americas?
3) Are frogs considered reptiles?
4) How many countries form the European Union?
5) What is the currency used in Japan?
If you’ve come this far, please keep reading! Because I believe you can make it all the way to the end without stumbling.
Brendan Baker a sociology professor at Hartford University said, “The larger the human population grows the average human IQ seems to drop.”
“Since the fifties the average IQ worldwide has dropped a total of three points,” Baker said. “This is alarming and confusing at the same time.”
Baker says the IQ will continue in a steady decline and by the year 2050 he expects an astounding decline of about ten points from the 1952 average. An IQ (Intelligence Coefficient) of 86.32 by 2050 … but don’t worry (lol) in 2011 it was about 88.52.
The Wechsler Intelligence Scale Classifies an IQ score of 86 as “dull normal intelligence” which is also considered close to mental retardation.
But it’s absurd to think that education has declined since the ’50s. So how come a more educated generation has become even more stupid?
There are a few reasons to consider why — instead of evolving into more intelligent creatures — we’re devolving into chicken-heads.
Dave Higgins from Social Media Today quoted Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times. He brought the point to a focus by stating that Social Media indeed makes users’ brains a baked potato.
“The central theme of Keller’s article is that social networking is more or less killing genuine personal relationships and conversation,” Higgins said.
“Facebook friends aren’t really ‘friends’ in the traditional sense,” Higgins said. “And Twitter conversations are killing the ability of people to hold meaningful and deep conversations.”
Higgins worries that Keller’s central message is that extensive use of social networking is causing humanity to lose vital mental skills.
But the problem does not end there. According to Newsweek creativity is also going down.
“With intelligence there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect; and in each generation, scores go up about ten points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter,” Newsweek informs. “With creativity, a reverse trend has just been indentified and for the first time is being reported here: American creativity scores are falling.”
But Kyung Hee-Kim from the College of William & Marry blames social media and video games and says, “It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining.”
“One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing video games rather than engaging in creative activities,” Hee-Kim said.
“Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect it is left to the luck of the draw that anyone becomes creative,” Hee-Kim said. “There’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.”
But with globalization sailing across other seas, it’s not just America that is trying to identify the world’s mental tumor. The Dalai Lama argues that today’s education is simply focusing on the material.
“Modern education is premised strongly on materialistic values,” The Lama said. “It is vital that when educating our children’s brains we do not neglect to educate their hearts, a key element of which has to be the nurturing of our compassionate nature.”
Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw got it right when they discovered a theory called “The Agenda Setting Model.” This theory states that the media tells you what to think about and how to think about it.
The media is also partly responsible in our free-market for the ideals and many troubles surrounding materialism. The media knows that competition runs the economy, but also the way people chose to live. So by competing with others and using materialism in advertisements, corporations can promote their products.
Have a laugh with the rest of students about what PhD Yoram Bauman thinks of the Professor and recognized Keynesian economist Gregory Mankin’s ten principles about what runs the economy. Watch and laugh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Sadly what Bauman translates is the so called unintentional and reptilian way “smart business markets advertise” using ‘Diffusion of Information theories’ to spread their materialistic agenda across the world — via propaganda — to those who are clueless.
But how would younger people recognize the problem? Simple! Read the Empire of Illusion, by Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, which charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion.
Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth.
The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a “reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic.” In this “other society” serious film and theatre productions, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins (people).
In other words, the common uneducated base of today’s world believes they are something they are not. And the media is just inflating minds with bursts of air to create zombies.
In our modern society, popular music is challenging musicians with watered down versions of reality. See what new rappers focus on in their lyrics: self pleasure, cash/money rules, sex, success, bit### … lol. Many artists from different music genres have a similar and materialism focus.
Focusing on materialism doesn’t increase peoples knowledge, it just makes them more proficient consumers!
But the change started a few decades back. The Baby Boomers, people born from 1946 to 1964 started the decline leading to what became known as Generation-X — anyone born from 1965 to 1980. The next generation (Generation Millennium), however, became even more materialistic and lacking in values.
There are three distinctive characteristics of the selfish generation that came with the Baby Boomers.
1) Behavior without consequences (In other words, do whatever you want nothing will happen to you.)
2) Security without sacrifice (You don’t have to pay a price to get the security you want.)
3) Reward without risk (You just get rewarded; you didn’t have to put yourself out there to get it.)
This was the spark for the problems that would transfer to Generation-X. Jeff Gordinier wrote a controversial piece in “X Saves The World.”
“We didn’t believe the same kind of things as Boomers. It was much harder to fool us.” Gordiner wrote. “Just as Xers shunned Boomer notions, it seems Millennials have similarly turned against the Gen-X ethos.”
“If the Gen-Xers were like, ‘No, I’m not in it for the money,’ Millennials rebelled against that and are completely greedy,” Gordinier said.
The British Journal of Social Psychology is the first to examine the impact that materialistic messages and values (desire for financial success and affluent lifestyle) have on a woman’s feelings about her body.
Lead author Eleni-Marina Ashikali says, “This research suggests that materialism, both as an internalized value and as a depiction in the media, should be taken into account for media literacy interventions and policy changes in the advertising industry.”
The problem however is that even literacy is going down hill. With literacy problems how can people get informed in a world were advertisers rule solidly supreme?
American Library Association president Molly Raphael said, “The nation cannot afford to continue losing readers.”
From a recent Poll: Over 19 per cent of those age 18 and up said they did not read a book over the past year, a jump from the 16 per cent who answered the same way for a 2005 Gallup Poll.
It is also estimated that the newer generation doesn’t read the stories of each news article. Instead they read the ‘headlines’ and make ‘the story’ without analyzing and investigating the content. Akin to licking the pulp of an orange without actually eating the orange.
Well the good news is that you don’t need to be a genius to read. Reading-Establishes-Awful-
Journalist Charles Pierce wrote, “The rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.”
“It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people who we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about,” Pierce wrote.
“In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist or a sage,” Pierce wrote. “And if everyone is an expert than nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”
Technology has replaced people’s brains and expensive libraries with mobile and portable tablets. One-on-one communication has been replaced by Facebook and has turned people into Bookfaces. Text messages have ruined Elmo’s ultimate DVD collection, and Sesame Street is now filing for bankruptcy!
So, be materialistic and stupid in a world self-absorbed by inflated propaganda promoted by corporate elites, to control the ignorant via advertisements. The injected notion that “anyone can be the next star” has thus far turned many into what we all hate from others! Selfish Zombies!
