The Shallows

I tried really hard to not just type, “Ok, boomer” and hit post.

Maybe it's just the age of the book showing a smidge, but the things this guy bemoans hardly seem catastrophic. Kindles come with the Internet built into the price! The Indianapolis Symphony lets people vote by text for the encore song! There are children who use laptops instead of books!

I am far from a tech-only booster. I think plenty of people would do well to thoughtfully reconsider the value of technology to the extent devices should be a tool. What this author misses is what I was after: reasonable arguments to analyze whether reading that book on your iPad is actually more distracting. Do you sit down to read the “newspaper” only to get sucked into Twitter? That stuff is problematic.

I'm sure many of us could remember our parents complaining we “always had our nose in a book”, as if it was a bad thing. But unlike reading, which the author tries to hold up as far back as Gutenberg, people didn't walk around incapable of working because they were reading. People didn't have “reading addictions”.

Tech like our phones should be tools, but the apps on them are increasingly engineered to be addictive and sociologically sticky.

This book doesn't get very deep into that.