Yet Another Idiotic Internet Is Bad for Children Study - Who funds these crackpots? AARP? They're too smart.

Why does Salon which I regularly read, print this crap? A typewriter enthusiast is convinced we're destroying our kids by letting them use computers:

March 14, 2008 | The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature.

This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting "the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life," particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing's condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of "a fragmenting culture" in which "young men and women ... have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers."

Kids today -- we're telling you! -- don't read, don't write, don't care about anything farther in front of them than their iPods. The Internet, according to 88-year-old Lessing (whose specialty is sturdy typewriters, or perhaps pens), has "seduced a whole generation into its inanities."

Um, wait a minute. You can't touch a computer without reading. I tell you what, I probably write more than you do in most days, and I use a computer. More people read me every day, link to me, discuss what I have to say, and I discuss what they have to say. I have real-life friends and colleagues that I've met through online communities.