Dumbing down

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Dumbing down is a dysphemism for a perceived over-simplification of, amongst others, education, news and television.

Some authorities believe that the audience — be it of television or print media — is being fed a mass-produced, poor quality, and populist diet that leads to an ever-decreasing audience attention span. These ideas have been in circulation for many decades in the social science literature on mass culture argued, for example, by Richard Hoggart, Rosenberg and David Manning White, and Raymond Williams. The sentiment has its roots in the Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis approach to culture, particularly the former's Culture and Anarchy.

The concept "dumbing down" can point to a variety of different things but the concept always involves a claim about the simplification of culture, education, and thought, a decline in creativity and innovation, a degradation of artistic, cultural, and intellectual standards, or the undermining of the very idea of a standard, and the trivialisation of cultural, artistic, and academic creations.

The term can be seen as subjective since what is labelled as "dumbed down" often depends upon the values of individuals of specific groups. Pierre Bourdieu discusses how the practices of dominant groups in society are legitimised to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. However, there is also evidence that knowledge of areas outside that defined by popular culture has diminished progressively in the late twentieth century (see Dumbing Down link below).

[edit] Education

Increased participation in higher education has attracted the maintenance of distinctions through the construction of the category Mickey Mouse degrees. Media studies, psychology and political science are often the key targets in media discourse, although the representations of such disciplines are often inaccurate.

In the UK, there is now an annual moral panic every August when GCSE and A-level results are released. Grade inflation is attributed to rising pass rates. Comparisons between examination questions are often produced as evidence of dumbing down (in mathematics, for example, an algebraic equation would be compared to a recent question about a "real life" problem).

[edit] Media

Increased competition and the introduction of econometric methods have radically changed mass media. Media consolidation has reduced both the breadth and depth of stories covered by mass media. Cost reduction leads to the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents in favor of news releases by political parties or businesses.

Ratings and audience tracking promotes the most simplified writing and articles with the widest possible interest. This often means celebrity gossip, entertainment marketing, and sensationalism.

[edit] Computing

Old-timers from the computer geek community regard the rise of GUIs in place of command line interfaces, the commercial exploitation of the Internet, and the consequent great increase in use by the non-technical public, as resulting in a great dumbing down in these areas, with the following of "proper" standards (technical and netiquette) declining precipitously.

As a response to the growing accessibility to the internet, the phrase Eternal September was coined, referring to the period starting from September 1993 when 'newbies' were no longer encountered only at the start of the academic year.

Developers of console-based computer games are also sometimes accused of dumbing down their products, particularly console-based sequels to earlier PC games. It is often alleged that the reason for this is the assumption that console owners are either less patient/intelligent, or simply prefer a more "direct" experience. Some recent examples of games accused of "console dumbing down" are Thief: Deadly Shadows (where several gameplay aspects of the earlier PC games are stripped out, such as the rope arrow and the swordfighting controls, and little or no reference is made to plot details of either of the earlier games) and games like Fahrenheit (which predominantly rely on simplified pattern matching and button mashing, usually with no actual relation to the operations they supposedly instruct the game to carry out, as opposed to skilled combination of manoeveures directly linked to input).