An American Revolution Revolution by Shawn Huckins

In his new series, An American Revolution Revolution, Shawn Huckins comments on today’s American culture, technology and how we interact with one another. Huckins feels our love affair with our little devices may be eroding our society in some ways and poses the question, “What would George post?”

Technology influences how much we know and what we believe, as well as how quickly and intelligently we convey our ideas. But does how we communicate govern the value of what we communicate? The physical act of typing very fast on small devices has undeniably impacted spelling, grammar and punctuation, encouraging a degree of illiteracy that has become the new social norm. As goes our grammatical literacy, do our social and cultural literacies follow? What should we make of the fact that the political organization Move-On.org has 109,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook while Justin Bieber has 6 million plus followers on Twitter? …

… Well-worn are the theories that advancing technology isolates us more, not less, and it is easy to idealize centuries-past life as simpler, more civil, more intelligent and, ironically, more ‘connected.’ The point is, we live in a very different time than our Founding Fathers did, and we would appear to place our priorities in very different places: what entertains our selves versus what serves our society. Clearly a society must be politically free to indulge in the luxury of such introspection. But has the complacency of our political freedom blinded us to the potential our ancestors fought for?

If George could comment today, would he click the ‘like’ button, or post wtf? and then go check his Lady Gaga tweet?