What is Really Happening to us?

Hedges knows these are bad days for newsrooms because he is not blind like the rest of us. Every day, a news organization or a famous newspaper reports losses or the need to shut down after numerous years serving its customers and giving them what they need, the real stories. Hedges believes that “the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.” (1). Basically, he is saying that technology isn’t the only reason that we are losing this institute of journalism slowly, but because we are too stupid to figure out what we are about to lose, and that giants such as Time Warner, and GE want to get their hands messy with the worlds events, especially politics. Hedges does an excellent job of countering the most common excuse about people using the newspapers’ websites; however, the time spent is much less that what it would take to read a newspaper and the internet is the easy way out, the shortcut to get what you want and get it fast.

Clive Thompson unlike Hedges sees the internet revolution the way I see it, the way most of my fellow classmates see it, and the way most people in America see it; it is progress. Unlike past generations, writing is a daily part of most teenagers’ lives. Instead watching television or doing something unproductive, most students get online and start typing and talking with one another and with people all around the world. As Thompson points out through one of his sources, Lunsford, the writing that is done on these sites do not translate into scholarly papers that are turned in at school. Rather than this being the decline of the literate America; maybe we are experiencing the revolution of our generation in which we are able to comprehend more at a quicker pace and continue practicing becoming more intelligent through the use of the internet via Facebook, CNN, etc.

Hedges and Thompson would most likely get into a duel over the pros and cons of the internet with both sides making valid points. Hedges shows us how as a nation; we are losing a valuable part of our culture that has withstood the test of time until now. Thompson on the other hand doesn’t go into this topic but shows how the excuse that Hedges makes, which basically is online journalism and social networking is actually a pro for us as a society and that it is helping us evolve with the time and increasing our intelligence rather than decreasing it and making us illiterate. While Thompson seems to be talking more formally, Hedges seems to be reaching out to a larger audience that can help slow down the fall of the newspaper/print media age.