This is an interesting article to me.  Its argument is that technology and the sheer velocity of life in our world is making it hard to be “deeply literate”.  In many ways, I want this argument to be right—I too fear that we are losing something important as a culture and as humans.  

But it’s weird that he anchors his argument in the evolutionary development of the brain over 200,000 years, but seems to skip over the fact that literacy has existed, at the uttermost, for 4500 years, and really been widespread only for about 500 years.  And then it turns out his complaint is really about the past decade or so, since the iPhone.  So he ends up arguing the following: 

“A greater percentage of Americans may be deep literate in 2019 than in 1819 or 1919, but probably not than in 1949, before television, the internet, and the iPhone.“  

It’s hard to read this as other than just the latest version of the classic codger complaint about “kids these days”.  Before the iPhone it was the interwebs more generally, and maybe email.  Then it was MTV.  Then it was TV more broadly.  Then I imagine it was radio.  There was a longstanding complaint about trains, as I recall from 19th century history.  And of course in the early print era, people thought print books offered less learning than manuscripts.

We may be facing serious cultural challenges, though I’m not sure a "decline narrative" captures them all very well.  

For my money, the intellectual seriousness, judgmental acuity, and stylistic capacities, of public intellectuals like Zadie Smith or James Wood or Siddhaartha Mukherjee (or even, in a more contrarian view, Lionel Shriver) or Jamelle Bouie are at a level that would enable them to compete in any decade in the twentieth century.

And on the plus side, it seems important to notice the way that public discourse, for all its vitriol and toxicity, seems actually to represent more adequately the range of perspectives and positions in our culture than earlier, more heavily "curated" (by authorities) public spheres managed to do.  There are definite problems with public discourse these days, and with the collective intellectual character of our common life; and both of these things have effects not only on the macro level, but on the micro level, on the way they impact our souls.  But there are good and powerful things about this too.  

But all that said, I do think there are problems with the public intellectual culture that seem distinctive to this age--perhaps some of it due to technology, some of it due to cultural changes--and we need to think hard about these.

Something more to think about in coming years.