The Rise and Fall and Rise of Critical Thinking

Bill Keller has an editorial in the NYT Magazine called The Twitter Trap, which bemoans the decline of, well, everything due to the rise in social networks. He basically blames Twitter and Facebook for the death of critical thinking, I think. While I know some who may share that sentiment, I would argue that curmudgeons have bemoaned the death of critical thinking before such a thing was born. I think it is probably the plot of Bye Bye Birdie (girls besotted with pop star can focus on nothing else). Back-in-my-day-ness requires a near-distant utopia of critical thinkers who've evolved unwittingly into idiots due to the rise of the printing press/telephone/Xerox machine/computer/etc.

But why is Bill Keller picking on Twitter? I can think of at least 10 things off the top of my head which are easily more to blame for the death of intellect. For example,

1. Spending too much time with one's children. In our utopian past, multiple generations raised our children, freeing us to commune with eachother, engage in political organizing, and become economically literate. Now I spend a solid 6 hours of the day discussing Star Wars and sharks. Critical faculties: DOA.

2. The length of professional sports' seasons. WTF hockey and basketball? Go away.

3. talk radio

4. laundry. Have you noticed how much there is, and how the clean stuff never gets folded?

5. video games*

6. MTV*

7. bridge, canasta, Trivial Pursuit, Settlers, etc. Basically any board game that grown-ups will meet to play.

8. Email*

9. matching our shoes to our bags

10. the casinos (basically pathological #7)

* These are pastimes which once wasted huge hours of my life, and no longer do, except for video games, which have migrated through every platform I've used. You can read about it in my autobiography: From Frogger to Tetris to Farmville to Cut the Rope: One Woman's Journey through Non-Violent Videogames.

Anyway, my point? Keller is sounding an alarm that has been sounded so many times that no one really believes it or cares. This too shall pass. Twitter will just get absorbed and shelved in its rightful place in the world, and people will be roughly as smart and as stupid as we've ever been.