Our brave new world

In "America the Illiterate", Chris Hedges critiques a great many things. He first defines the two sections of the American public today - those who read print-based texts - those people who live in the "literate world" and those who exist in a "non-reality based belief system". Hedges then goes on to quote some statistics about the second section, such as the fact that "eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."

Hedges then talks about the political campaigns today. How they conform to the laziness and ineptitude of the people today in order to be successful. Hedges then looks at the analysis of the Princeton Review to show how the American public have gotten stupider over time seeing that the political debates that happened before used a much higher range of vocabulary than debates do nowadays. Hedges finally hammers in the concept that America is becoming less intelligent rapidly - becoming a people with only entertainment as the objective rather than the outcome of work as shown by his phrase "Today the most famous person is Mickey Mouse". He ends by stating his view of the American people. He says that,

"The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying".

Hedges defines literacy as the ability to function in a print-based, literate world which also includes the ability to cope with complexity and intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. I don't find anything confusing in his article but I do find something a lot of troubling concepts about the way Hedges portrays the American people. Hedges insinuates that everyone is just plain stupid and can't do anything to save their life. Though, I believe that the society is degenerating rapidly, not everyone is stupid - something Hedges fails to point out. Another thing I don't like about this article is it's one-sidedness. Only one point is argued and that's it. This is one major difference I see between Hedges article and Carr's article. However, Hedges and Carr's portrayal of the American people are the same. They both mention the rapid decay of society due to various reasons and both of them back up their points with hard evidence, research and unforgettable phrases such as, "This is our brave new world".