Inquiry Contract Proposal

Prince Ali
AP Literature


Inquiry Contract Paper Proposal


     When I first heard that we would be doing a paper in which we chose a controversial issue and proposed a solution, I thought it was inevitable that I would choose something “said and done”, like Gay Marriage or Torture. But I think that I’ve come up with a rather interesting topic, one that has lots of heated discussions over its solution.
     When you turn on the TV or surf the web, you are bombarded with topic after topic after topic. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You navigate to a Wikipedia article, and every fifth word links to another article. You watch CNN, and not only is there a new story every 20 seconds or so, but every five minutes there are a series of 15 or 30 second long advertisements.
     In my paper, I will examine whether or not this “rapid-fire” of information is having a detrimental effect on the attention spans of children and young adults in America. Is Google keeping us from reading web articles longer than 1,000 words? Do people buy videogames and new gadgets not because people need them, but merely because they’re released; they’re out there for us to have? A new iPod comes out every six months. Boom. New TV shows are introduced every couple weeks. Boom. Text messages are limited to 256 characters, but can be sent almost indefinitely. Boom. Is this healthy?
     One of the things that inspired this topic was an article I read a while ago. I don’t remember much of what the article said, but I do remember the general gist of it. In 1990 (I’m sure I’m going to get the actual facts wrong here; I don’t have the article sitting in front of me) a study was conducted in which children were asked to sit still and do nothing. They were timed to see how long it took the child to loose concentration or get distracted. It was found that the average time for a seven year old to get distracted was around 10 minutes. The test was later repeated in 2000. The average time a seven year old could concentrate had dropped to just over 2 minutes.
     Some people have talked about the idea of “Future Schlock”. Future Schlock is when a society begins to suffer from an intelligence decay. In other words, it’s when a society becomes so fixated on something that the average intelligence level drops dramatically. Neil Postman, in his article “Future Schlock”, that Americans have become so addicted to entertainment that they’ve lost the ability to learn from new technologies or abilities. All they can do now is be entertained.
     In my paper, I will argue that this “Future Schlock” is happening right now, and it is the result of the “data high” that humans get, the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Historically, the entire world is the closest it’s ever been to having universal freedom of information. The internet allows everyone (with permission from their government) have access to articles on everything from Chaos Theory to the History of Norwegian Flowerpots. I can turn on the TV and see images captured seconds earlier on the other side of the world. And, no matter where I am or what time it is, I can call almost anyone I want to from my cell phone.
     The reason that literacy rates are up and library checkout rates are down is that no one has the patience to get into a book over 1,000 pages. No one has the time to turn to A6 for more on the White House press release yesterday. Children as young as a few years old are barraged by the same advertisements you and I are, and their lowered attention span is keeping them from reaching their full intellectual potential.
     What do I propose we do about this? I don’t yet have a concrete idea yet, since I’ve only read the Postman article so far, but I have some general ideas. Parents should be restricting and monitoring children’s access to the internet when they are young. Schools should be focusing less on breadth of knowledge and more on depth of knowledge. TV channels geared towards young kids (PBS, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel) should have stricter regulations on what they can and can not show, the length of their programs, etc.
     As I continue to do research, I’m sure that I will arrive on better, more specific, and more effective solutions to this problem.