'Digitally addicted kids threaten to return civilisation to the Dark Ages'

One of the most troubling of all American cases over the last couple of years is that of Megan Meier, an overweight, psychologically troubled St Louis, Missouri, teenager who committed suicide in 2006 after she was cyberbullied by an online boyfriend called "Josh Evans".

Later, however, it transpired that Josh was actually Lori Drew, the middleaged mother of an ex-friend of Meier's, who – quite literally – drove the teenager to hang herself in the closet of her bedroom.

I'm not alone in observing the consequences of online technology for reading habits, literacy, and education. Over the past 18 months, a series of excellent books and articles have been published by experienced academics and journalists who share my concern about the dire intellectual and cognitive consequences of the digital revolution. The news, I am afraid, is bleak.

In The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, the Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein demonstrates how the internet is making young people increasingly ignorant about almost everything except online video games and the narcissism of self-authored internet content. He draws a depressingly consistent causal relationship between the rise of digital literacy and the decline of cultural literacy. The more skilled kids become in using the tools of the digital revolution, he demonstrates, the more ignorant they become about the objective world around them. The informational abundance of the Web 2.0 age, according to Bauerlein, is creating a famine of intelligence. And so the most tangible fruit of the digital revolution is the "dumbest generation", a term Bauerlein borrows from Philip Roth's The Human Stain, a dark novel about the collapse of educational standards in a digitally infatuated America.

So why has this generation become so dumb? In an Atlantic Monthly cover article that asks "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Nicholas Carr persuasively argues that the internet is undermining both our ability and our desire to read anything beyond short blog posts and instant messages. Carr's argument is scientific rather than moral. The internet, he argues, has been "tinkering" with our brains. It is eroding our ability to concentrate and contemplate intellectually, the mental requisites that allow us to read and digest books. Instead of readers, the digital revolution is transforming all of us into skimmers – highly skilled at mentally jumping from hypertext to hypertext link, but increasingly unable to digest long or complex textual information, particularly in book form. Quoting the Tufts University developmental psychologist and leading authority on the act of reading, Maryanne Wolf, Carr reminds us we are not only "what we read" but also "how we read".

Thus, today's skimming generation is becoming more mentally superficial, unable to think in anything beyond the intellectually impoverishing currency of instant messages, emails, and short web posts. The historical consequences of Carr's observations are deeply worrying. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, the Boston Globe columnist Maggie Jackson suggests that the increasingly low attention span and poor cognitive skills of today's multi - tasking, digitally addicted kids threatens to return civilisation to another dark age, one of what she calls "shadows and fears".

August 410 is an eerily symbolic date for Jackson. It was then, she says, that the Goths sacked Rome, thereby ending classical civilization and dragging Europe into a 1,000-year dark age. Jackson tells us that the Roman Emperor at the time, Honorius, was so distracted that when informed of Rome's fall, he imagined that one of his beloved chickens had died.

She believes that today's digital generation has become so wired, so split focused, so inattentive to the looming threat of mass inattention that, like modern Honorii, we are in what she calls a "twilight culture" which is teetering on the brink of a new dark age of ignorance and misinformation.

Taken from the new edition of 'The Cult of the Amateur' by Andrew Keen (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £9.99, out tomorrow). To order at a special price, call 08700 798 897. Andrew Keen returns as a columnist next week.