Exactly the same arguments were made in the 1960s about the baby boomers.

This article is yet another example of each generation reviling the ones that follow. It says more about the intransigent and inflexible attitudes of the critic than it does about what is being criticised.

The comments which this article will generate will illustrate the author's point. We can expect rude and smart-arse put downs, implying that the author is an idiot, a conservative, and not one of the clever people who know better. If there are any criticisms of the author's logic, they wll not be substantiated.
This is exactly what the article is about - cultural boorishness, which works only for the intellectual bully - who wanders onto the school playground, hurls insults at those he or she doesn't like, and stalks off feeling vindicated. It's sad. I wish they'd go an do some voluntary community work, or even go and sit on a beach and watch the waves coming in.

A very thought provoking article.

Sean,I don't know whether to laugh or to cry with joy.Lots of what you've said has been stated elsewhere in bits and pieces but you've put the whole truth, and nothing but, together so well.
I hope the critics who will want to speak and thus reveal their faint but unmistakable branding with progressive Marxist/Socialist theory, an unseen mark on the mind remaining like the scum around a blind-man's bathtub, will take pause before responding.

They should see, as I have, groups of teenagers entertaining themselves by sitting around a large table from 8 pm until 3 am, speaking only occasionally and in monosyllables, fuelled by Red Bull and crisps, immobile, fixed upon their respective laptops which each has brought to this overnight "LAN Party."

This looks like being the future, one which you point to so clearly. One where the human intellect will atrophy, eschewing vocabulary and the depths and shades of expression of all sorts for a creole of two hundred or so grunts and gestures. Smart monkeys we are, and now we enter a regressive phase to re-become mere monkeys.
Asimana

And yet IQ scores keep drifting ever upward...(the mysterious Flynn effect). Personally I'm quite skeptical of what exactly it is that IQ tests measure, but I'd like to see some actual scientific evidence that we are a "increasingly uneducated, illiterate and uncouth society". The subjective evidence perhaps indicates that the "uneducated, illiterate, and uncouth" element of society that has always been with us is growing an ever louder voice, as they attract the attention of the media and advertisers looking for ever bigger markets, but I'm not convinced this is any sort of precursor to the atrophying of human civilisation.

Personally, I think the rise of the Internet, and blogging in particular, has dramatically revitalised intellectual debate in this country. 15 years ago there was barely anywhere I could go to engage in the level of reasonable informed discussion that I take for granted at sites like OLO. Even 10 years ago I could only find it on international forums like usenet.

Re Analyst and no evidence

The following was published in 1970. It speaks for itself.

"One is struck by how philistine the young are.. They are remarkable… for their evident determination to barbarize; for their preoccupation with style and their boundless appetite for banality; ... for their disinterest in ideas; for their individual inarticulateness.”

Aldridge, John IN THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG Harpers Magazine Press, New York 1970 P 111