Saturday, May 7, 2011

Omigod, Who Is Osama Bin Whatevs? - Noreen Malone - National - The Atlantic

A little bird told me: Something big happened to some guy somewhere.

“Who is Osama bin Laden?”

Yet according to Yahoo Search trends, on May 1, the question was the fifth-most-searched phrase on the search engine 66 percent of those searches came from teenagers, who would have been small children when the twin towers fell.

It was a failure of our education system (and this was even before considering the grammar and punctuation). It was a slap in the face to those who'd lost someone on 9/11 or in the wars since. The instinct to take to Twitter as resource-of-first-resort said something frightening about the way the rising generation consumes information, and augurs dire things for the future of facts and truth; so does the ease with which we can block out anything we don't seek out specifically on the ever-specialized Web.

Omigod, Who Is Osama Bin Whatevs? - Noreen Malone - National - The Atlantic

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