Conformity at its Finest

In an article titled America the Illiterate, the author Chris Hedges argues that America as a whole is slowly losing its ability to form its own ideas and essentially becoming less literate (as the title clearly suggests). While I do agree with Hedges overall argument, in this dramatic piece, Hedges proposes many statistics that lack any source of information or citation. He suggests that almost “a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate” a good chunk of the population of the US and yet no mention of where these numbers were acquired.

While I do question his astonishing statistics, his overall case is made clear. Often when receiving information we do not reflect upon it or question it but simply accept it and move on. In a sense this information is fed to us, but we don’t get a choice of what food we are eating. The media simply feeds us the food they want us to eat. With such a biased source of media this can be dangerous. We base our ideas “not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain” Hedges says (Hedges, 2), that while sometimes the information itself is questionable, we choose to accept it because we like the pictures it presents to us. Carr in his article Is Google Making us Stupid? agrees stating that “[n]ever has a communications system played so many roles in our lives–or exerted such a broad influence over our thoughts” (Carr, 5). Showing that the images that are displayed to us over the television screen or on the many Internet websites, when resorting to this uneducated way of accepting what is told to us, hold a great power over society that is only becoming bigger.

In the ideas proposed in both articles, suggest that conformity to others ideas is easier then developing one’s own idea. In the changing uses of media and news, our biased sources of information are becoming more and more powerful based on the idea that we accept the information that is sometimes falsely portrayed by our information sources. While Hedges article takes the dramatic approach to proposing this idea, the point he is making rings true and is daunting to think about when we look farther ahead into the future.