For ten whole minutes after reading America the Illiterate I sat here in front of my computer, surprised and embarrassed that the country in which I lived had over 90 million people who couldn’t read at a sixth grade level. It was like someone had plunged a knife into my heart. This was such a blow to me because I personally love reading, as I’m sure you can tell from my last post.

I felt deeply upset when I was reading Nicolas Carr’s “is Google making us stupid” because I realized how much I have lost, but that doesn’t even compare to this. Millions of people unable to enjoy literature, it was just incomprehensible to me. I know I’m rambling on again and basically saying the same thing over and over again, it just had such a profound effect on me.

Well now I have to get back to actual work, and I’m going to skip right to the last question about the connections between Hedges’s column and Carr’s article. Now what I’ve noticed is actually less of a connection and more of a relation. Carr’s article is warning us about the internet and its effects on our brains. Meanwhile Hedges’s column shows how we have already been affected.

“There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.”

If this continues much longer our country will be controlled by the illiterate who make choices based on pictures which when you look at it is just like what happens in the movie Idiocracy. (sorry no links)