Mark Bauerlein response to Henry Jenkins

While many of Henry's criticisms of the film correctly apply to the medium of the TV documentary general, his final point does get to the heart of the question of Digital Nation: "The web is. How do we use it in a way which maximizes the benefits and lowers the risks?" He then criticizes the filmmakers, though, for being "more interested in the 'dangers' than the 'benefits' of digital life." (Let's overlook the odd allegation that Doug was invoking a racist stereotype in Korea.)

But what if the filmmakers genuinely believe that the dangers are more worth reporting, and for sound journalistic reasons? One of them could even be that they are convinced that the most common behaviors and popular activities of teens online have troubling consequences. They appreciate the wonders of digital technology, but see too much evidence of misguided impressions (such as how kids think they're great at multitasking), harried lives (as in Avrom and Bubbe's comment just above), and poor intellectual outcomes (such as declining reading scores for 12th-graders).

These consequences are widespread phenomena, while the counterexamples of good Web usage that Henry mentions are, in fact, microphenomena. He cites home-schooling, but only around 3 percent of U.S. kids are home-schooled. He cited online book clubs, but while I don't know of data on how many there are and how many teens participate, given the many surveys of book-reading habits that show steep declines among teen and young adults over the years (including the Kaiser survey mentioned previously), online book clubs, too, are a tiny venture. And, of course, so are protests outside the "military-industrial complex." That doesn't mean that they aren't important, but only that in the big picture of digital influence on the young, they have a pretty small place.

Finally, the statement "It is nonsensical to make a judgement about whether the web is good or bad" doesn't account for the dynamic role of Web tools in current behaviors. Yes, Henry is right that it all depends on what people do with them. But if the tools allow you to do things you had never done before, then the tools themselves have a formative impact on the good and bad that people do.