Is the decline real?

You open a long article, read three paragraphs, and find yourself in another tab with no memory of leaving. Maybe you used to read whole novels in a weekend and now it feels like work. The worry is that something has been done to your attention. The worry itself is very old. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells of an Egyptian king who was offered the gift of writing and judged it harmful. People who trust marks outside themselves, the king warns, will stop exercising their memories and will seem wise without being wise. Every reader notices the joke: we know about the warning only because Plato wrote it down. Each new medium has faced the same charge. In 1545 the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner complained that the flood of printed books had become confusing and harmful. In 1985 Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television was turning public life into show business, and that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where people are undone by what they enjoy, had proved a better prophecy than Orwell's 1984. In 2008 the writer Nicholas Carr asked in The Atlantic whether Google was making us stupid, after noticing he could no longer sink into a long book the way he once had. The alarmists were partly right each time. Writing did change memory, and print did flood the world with junk. People also adapted, and the habits they built were often the very ones the next generation would mourn. So the open question is whether this is the same story again. One thing is new: a book never rearranged itself to keep you reading, and a feed does. Think about your own attention five years ago and now. What have you lost, and what, if anything, have you gained?