Missed oppurtunities

We think that even English professors should respect the difference\nbetween correlation and causation: just because ignorance of big lakes\nand oratorios got worse when the digital age dawned doesn't mean that\nthe latter caused the former. To establish that, you need data. Alas,\nthere isn't much. The ideal experiment is hard to pull off: to study\nthe effect of digital technology on cognitive processing in a rigorous\nway, you must randomly assign groups of young people to use it a lot, a\nlittle or not at all, then follow them for years. As one 19-year-old of\nour acquaintance said about the chances of getting teens to volunteer\nfor the \"not at all\" group, \"Are you out of your [deleted] mind?\"

Greenfield's prose--a near-continuous train wreck of redundancies, mixed\nmetaphors and self-contradictions (\"this literally incredible concept,\"\n\"an ever-changing visual image\")--is perhaps the worst enemy of her\nattempts to persuade. This is unfortunate, because however much\ntechnophiles may snort, she is articulating widely held fears that have\na basis in fact. Unlike even their immediate antecedents, the latest\nelectronic media are at once domestic, mobile and work-related,\nblurring the boundaries between these spaces, and video games are at\ntheir forefront, both in terms of the time users lavish on them and\ntheir ceaseless technological innovation. A generational rift has\nopened that is in many ways more profound than the equivalent shifts\nassociated with radio or television: more alienating for those\nunfamiliar with new technologies, more immersive for those who are.