Some time ago, I received an e-mail from Peter and Tony who had developed an info-graphic called Generation Screwed.
Being inherently curious, I took a look to see what they were arguing. On one hand, they presented some rather interesting statistics on the challenges facing the Millennial generation as it enters the workforce.On the other, there were no sources stated for these statistics, which I knew in some cases were outright wrong.
But the thing that first got my attention was the obscene icon placed at both the top and bottom of the screen. I’ll be the first to appreciate creative attempts to capture attention. But if the authors felt it necessary to publish an obscenity in order to do so, maybe they should have taken the time to develop a better argument.
In their e-mail, Peter and Tony asked for my reaction to what they had created and suggested that I pass it along to my readers. In a way, I am doing so here, but not with the intent they had in mind. In this age of the so-called citizen journalism, it is easy to be overcome by the enormous amount of information on any subject that can be generated by a Google search lasting .23 seconds. But all this makes me wonder what’s happening to the quality of information or, better still, information we are creating. The older of us may feel overwhelmed by having to sift thru everything that purports to be relevant to a topic. But at least most of us have a built in crap detector based on experience.
But what about those who have come of age in the digital world that has proliferated in the past few years? Will they be able to discern between knowledge worthy of learning and information that looks the part but is just plain wrong? Most us have become increasingly skeptical of everything we see and hear. Today’s digital natives have been skeptical from the beginning. But doesn’t skepticism require a benchmark of knowledge and experiences against which all input is compared? If everything is suspect, then how do you know what’s worth knowing?
I wonder if all this doesn’t contribute the papers that students seem to cobble together with information taken at face value? A few years ago, a high school humanities teacher in New Jersey assigned a research paper on a particular topic. What the students didn’t know was that he had posted a bunch of bogus information on Wikipedia under the same heading. About 24 hours before the paper was due, he replaced the original bogus information with a different bunch of bogus information. As you might suspect, he ended up with two types of submissions, one containing the original nonsense and another containing nonsense 2.0. Sadly, many in the Millennial generation are not learning to decipher what’s worth knowing from what’s not. If this is the case, how will they able to argue persuasively on any issue going forward?