This blog had me agreeing on the surface throughout but after finishing it I was skeptical of a theory this grand.
The data is all there and again, very agreeable as you read it. But, you check in with yourself after and you go, ‘who do I know that is like this?’ and the answer is, for me at least, a mixed bag. Meaning, to a degree I very much feel post-literate because of how much time I spend in front of a screen. But, I also still read and go outside and have not shelled myself off to the screen. And many of my friends I would say, or guess, are roughly the same.
But, if there were a Pascal’s Wager to the question of “is it the phones?” that explains a lot of our malaise, I think I would probably take the wager in believing that it is.
So I am of two minds here: 1) hesitant to accept big grand theories that idealizes the past and discounts very heavily the present and 2) I think it’s probably the phones.