4 ms·

Watching TV Makes You Smarter

• jseliger 17y ago
  ... Except that there's a large body of research demonstrating otherwise. The recent New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books" at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071... is a good place to start.
  • jdminhbg 17y ago
    From that article: "According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale..." I don't know if this sentence is meant to raise alarms about the public's literacy or about journalists' numeracy. Without having seen the study itself, I'm going to guess that 0.2% is within its margin of error. The first page makes a lot of slippery statistical arguments about people 'reading less,' but there's no factual connection between the opening numerical salvo and the transition on page 2: "...some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special 'reading class'..." Older people have always thought that younger people are stupid and illiterate, and that future young people will be even stupider and more illiterate.