Camriea Hte Treatlieli.. Wait thats dyslexia not illiteracy

      Well, that was dense. I saw a three page article and was pumped it was only going to take me ten minutes to read it. Needless to say, it was pretty thick. Chris Hedges really knows how to pack it in. He describes America as separated into two different societies. He doesn’t separate America by race or gender, but rather the ability to read or not. He describes the one part of America that can read as the minority, and characterizes them by the fact that they “Function in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.” The other as “Dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.” The second part of America described by him is what he would consider illiterate. The first, clearly being literate. One part of these definitions which I could confusing was that he thinks only the literate can separate illusion from truth. In my political science class last fall, we learned that people who aren’t able to read and keep up with politics like many people try to do work on something called a “gut feeling”. For example the time we are in right now, many people aren’t keeping up with everything in the debates because they are too lazy to pick up a paper or they aren’t able to read the paper, but they evaluate presidential candidates on personal attributes such as height, smile, tone, and the overall way in which he presents himself. This is not always helpful however studies in my class showed that more often than not the people who could not read pick the same person as those who could, but for very different reasons.

     This article was somewhat similar to the one that Nicholas Carr wrote, except that he didn’t talk about the part of America that couldn’t read. He merely talked about the part of America that could and if they kept up with their current habits of surfing the web like they do, they may switch sides or come much closer to not being able to read.

    One of my favorite parts of this article came at the very end. I mentioned something like it in my last post because Carr’s article also touched upon it. In Carr’s article he talked about the Internet absorbing other media sources only for them to never resurface again. Hedges says, “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.” These two ideas relate because as time goes on, more and more gets lost. I hope that there is not a grim future ahead of us without print media and the ability to think analytically.