Blog Post 7: Illiterate, or Just Lazy?

Are Americans really becoming illiterate? That is what Chris Hedges wants us to believe. But is it true? Hedges claims that over 92 million of the population of America is illiterate or semi-literate, a term he defines as those "who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level" (1). He also goes on to say that the illiterate will believe mostly everything they are told and do no research it to back it up. Hedges says politicians need only a story that does not have to be true. He claims that "it can be completely at odds with the facts" (2). This is where the hipocrisy lies in his argument; all of is information is just written on the page, no sources, no outside references. I, as an "illiterate person,"  most likely one of his "42%" of high school gradutates that "never reads a book" would not even have the ability to look up his facts to check to see if they were true. At times, it even seems as if this article was written in a hysterical frenzy attacking Barack Obama because Hedges was bitter that Obama won the presidency (as indeed, this article was published a week after the election ended).

Thompson's article, however, appeared it was not written in a blind rage, and he points out, citing his sources, that our generation is more literate than ever; more than "38 percent of [what we write] took place out of the classroom" (1). This is significant, as as short as 40 years ago, almost no one wrote outside of school, except for the occasional letter. He adds that the social networking phenomenon has also greatly increased our ability to modify our tone and judge our audience in order to successfully get our point across (a lesson of which Hedges should take note).

While it is true in Hedges' claim that we are becoming more image-based as a society, that does not necessarily mean that we are illiterate; it just proves to show that we are becoming lazier as technology progresses, to the point where reading takes too much effort as opposed to looking at an image and having our brain do the work for us.