The Death of the Campfire

Two twin convictions are common to every generation. First, that the world as we know it is coming to a crashing and ignominious end. Second, that kids today just don't get it. As Roger Sterling said with dismay on Mad Men, set in the early 60's, "I miss the 50's".

As a teacher I witness the phenomenon of literate students who can not read a page. They are literate in the sense that they are able to perform the function of reading. But when I say that they cannot read a page, I mean that they are physiologically incapable of focusing on reading for the sustained 90 seconds that it would take them to read a page.

It is a rather bizarre thing to behold. It's not that these students don't know how to read; it's just that they can't do it. Not that that makes any sense.

Part of this inability to focus on anything for more than 2 minutes can be attributed to, or blamed on, laziness, apathy, and a sense of being entitled to instant gratification without any investment of time or effort in the task at hand.

But there is a deeper shift at play. Studies have shown, and simple observation makes obvious, that the brains of these teenagers are physiologically different than mine. And I'm still young enough that I could blend in with these students if I sagged my pants sufficiently and used the N or F word twice per sentence.

This physiological shift cannot be undone any more than we can regain our opposable toes. And in both cases, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Of course it seems awful to the older generations, but such has it always been.

In my mind, texting, tweeting, cell phones, and web surfing are so inferior to the deliberate and solitary dissection of a well-written book that there is no comparison. It's not apples and oranges; it's apples and cement.

But we would do well to disenthrall ourselves from our own perspective occasionally, not in the interest of sacrificing our principles, but in the interest of empathy and rigorous self-analysis. If we do that, we see ourselves as the radicals rather than the conservatives.

Educated people my age and older read books. We are able to do so. Most younger people simply cannot. But let's think back to a few hundred years ago when books first became available to the masses. The older folks must have been horrified back then, too.

Before books arrived, knowledge, stories, and information was relayed orally. People would sit around the campfire. Some among them were able to recite the equivalent of thousands of pages of text from memory. The rest were able to sit and listen.

How many people today could memorize thousands of pages of text? Nobody. Our brains are physiologically different now because we have books. We don't need to be able to memorize reams of information because we can simply read it. So our brains have evolved correspondingly.

And we can be sure that when this shift took hold, the older generations were disgusted. They probably thought reading was antisocial, since the individual no longer had to sit around the campfire with their peers to obtain information. Now, they could simply slink of by themselves and read in solitude.

Not only did reading make people less social, it also withered away their ability to memorize huge amounts of data, just as digital media have eroded today's youth's ability to sit still and read from a book.

I don't know what the positive side to this recent shift could possibly be. In my mind, it makes children hyperactive, spoiled, and scatterbrained. The only comfort I can take is the conviction that the story-tellers of old would have though the exact same thing about me and my love of books.