The experience of passive consumption (cable TV, tiktok, etc, pointed out in another comment here) is essentially the experience of psychological obliteration.
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
I'm mildly affected by "modern web" issues, and I reckon that the imaginative part of my brain is in a coma whenever I browse these sites. The minute I'm outside of an internet connection, a whole lot of emotions, ideas, plans come back at once. And very very rarely can I browse the web while not losing that. This is something I didn't experience before... say smartphones, even with a good dsl line, i wasn't dilluted in pages likes that.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
You’re commenting on an article about reading, which is also a solitary passive consumption activity. I suspect you’re not trying to make the point that reading books destroys relationships and self construction, so this seems like a roundabout way of saying that your favored passive consumption activity is better than what other people choose.
>But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
This is essentially Neil Postman's argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death [0]. The basic idea is that the medium matters, and different media are better suited to different types of messages and discourse. This is why I rail against social media--in particular things like Twitter/X and Bluesky, because their basic structure leads to poor communication outcomes.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
> When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed.
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
I think this is a very salient point, namely the danger of passive consumption is the losing the sense of oneself. We can be become so absorbed by the objects of our attention that we forget ourselves and this has very real consequences both on of physiology but also our psychology. So part of the solution is to "remember yourself" while you're consuming or directing your attention towards any object, so you are the subject and you are attending to an object. The last piece of the puzzle is that both you, the subject, and the object of your attention are located in space, so location/context is the third essential aspect of the experience to internalize for proper harmony, as far as I understand it.
I didn't see Andy Farnell's "Digital Self-Defense" mentioned, but I think it's relevant here -- analogous to how one should be cognizant of personal safety when navigating a city (or even while crossing a busy intersection).
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?
Simple but effective solution:
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.
Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
My 2 cents:
1- 'The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.'
More here
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-printed-books-a...
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine.
-Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities.
-Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
The COVID school closures and remote learning years will prove to be the biggest negative educational/developmental impact on a generation that we've seen in a long time.
>I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
Are demographics controlled for here? We know the proportion of foreign born has been increasing since the 70s, are these results attempting to remove the effect of non-native speakers?
The title and apparent argument of this confound me somewhat. For those of us who read many, many books very frequently, but stick mostly to digital versions simply out of space and access convenience, it's not hard to feel as if we're somehow being looked down upon because we're not hauling around a bundle of weighty tomes..
Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
I read digital and dead tree, but there is a spatial understanding I gain from books that I don't get with ebooks. Like, if I want to re find a passage, I usually have a physical sense of where in the book it is, and can flip to it within 10 or 20 pages. That's the major difference for me at least between the two.
Yeah, I had to look closely as well to figure out what this was saying. The core reasoning seems to be this one sentence: "Printed books are a zone of resistance against the neon god of the algorithm since tinkering with code can’t delete their contents, as hackers recently did with the Internet Archive."
But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
But the tome's weight is borne up by the table, whereas throwing any light in your face will affect your eyes. Possibly dawn and twilight gazing are quite beneficial.
In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
Thanks this is the perspective I was looking for. Like how television was imagined to bring Shakespeare to the masses, but instead met the masses where they are. And how people in the losing party lament the ignorance of the voters when it has always been so, or worse.
It's basically constant that many people will fearmonger and some will embrace new technology. I think this is basically independent of the actual merits and drawbacks of the given technology. Regardless of these strange asymptotes, I would say technology has been advancing from less benefit/risk to more in time, and so we will get closer to the fearmongerers being right. I suppose it could mean that we harness the benefits and waive the risks, but in practice it seems unlikely.
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on?
I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
This seems to conflate short-form media as "digital" and long-form media (books) as paper. This is patently untrue.
I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.
The biggest eye roll for me is the underlying assumption that these behaviors are new with the internet, new with even ticktock. We have a blindness towards how we used to receive our propaganda. No one probably noticed it was the prince paying off the town cryer to speak their praise. Or that it was the chief telling the shaman what to utter in prophecy to control their position. It has always been useful to control the mindshare of a people and emotional half or less than truths can always be dressed up in ways that innately satisfy us like music notes completing a chord progression. Rationality, fact, and logic often has no such advocate crafting the message towards maximal monkey brain compatibility. It just exists.
Readit News
When you get sucked into reels, you go from "here" to "there," and in the process, while you are "there," your entire whole self is destroyed. The same psychological phenomena happens to gambling addicts, alcoholics, or users of heroin. It has fewer physiological downsides and side-effects as those things; the only material loss you have is the loss of time.
But far more remarkable than that it's simply a waste of time, and rarely articulated, is this psychological loss. The destruction of the self. That echoes through a person's life, to their relationships, their self-construction, etc. It is those echoes that we are now dealing with on a mass sociological scale.
By the way. "There" has a lot of upsides too. People can be creative, productive, expressive while they are "there" too. Creating, being funny, being social, etc. That's why this is so hard.
ps: now that I think about it, it started around the ajax era.. as soon as a webpage could change parts in the blink of an eye your perception of the web is altered IMO.
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Cervantes, 1605:
>In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it...
Now we're all Men of La Mancha.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
I think many can personally attest that either your use of "you" is waaaaay too presumptive or that your use of sucked into represents a mode of engagement that only certain people experience at certain times.
Your rhetorical flourish of making it all sound universal and damning is pretty, but it doesn't really hold.
Most people, most of the time, even if they are heavy total consumers, are just idly filling bits of time the way they might nervously chew on their lip or pick at a finger. They may get regularly caught up in the behavior without conscious intent but are far from "obliterated" and easily escape it when other concerns arise. That's a long long way from the addictions you compare it to.
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https://www.solent.ac.uk/blogs/media-technology-blogs/digita...
Asking for a friend...
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“There,” “here,” psychological obliteration—what is this but sciency reasoning, on par with boomers claiming, “Games make kids violent”?
“Your entire whole self is destroyed.” Jeez.
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Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
Or democracy will perish eventually.
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From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
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Strange that religion isn't mentioned in the article.
Religion is the bedrock of epistemological 'collapse'.
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
Let alone the median general public.
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2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
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What happened to the talent? Have they moved industries or is there just not enough cash to pay them? Something else?
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Why should print be so specifically necessary if a book's content is what defines it? That I might read, say, Umberto Eco, in digital makes it no less intellectually valuable than if I bought a paperback version, or if you want to get really fancy about things, a hard cover, if those are still even released...
If anything, being able to carry hundreds of books of all kinds around with me nearly anywhere on my Kindle, or even on my cell phone, makes it all the easier to read more voraciously. With this it requires no extra effort beyond that of having with you a device that you'd in any case carry, and thus taking advantage of many more spare moments between daily activities..
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But you don't have to retreat from software entirely. You can read offline to keep someone over the network from tampering with contents. You can advocate for and obtain DRM-free experiences so tampering is easier to spot. You can make many copies of the bits for yourself, leaning into one of software's great strengths. So I think there are many ways to resist the "neon god" here. But we do each of us have to think for ourselves about the consequences of our choices.
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In 1494, Johannes Trithemius printed De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes" assailing the development of the printing press. The same argument was made, but from the perspective of the manual scribe, that a printer doesn't understand a work as well as a scribe does, as the speed of reproduction doesn't have the same intent that a person lovingly copying by hand does.
Similarly, Plato made the same argument aginst books themselves in the Phaedrus (circa 370BC): "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
And I'm sure in the murky recesses of human evolution, a curmudgeonly man felt the same about speech itself: "How will child know own breath when choked by breath of others?"
And I'm also certain in the near future, when ergodic literature has replaced the solitary linear author, there will be nostalgia for the same: "When everyone chooses for themselves which path the large language storyteller takes, we deprive ourselves of the common ground that is the unchanging epub. As Chesterton wrote one hundred and fifty years ago, 'Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.' We might write today 'In chaos, the Tolkien model might take Frodo to Erebor, or the Southron Lands, but the author is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he writes Mordor, and lo! It is Mordor.'"
In short, Cronus eats his children.
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Tautology.
> The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group
There is no causal link here.
It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always.
Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.
Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:
* Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons.
* Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures.
* Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.
Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
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I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
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> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
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I can experience the disconnection same while 'digital' reading on my e-reader in a cozy chair in the middle of nowhere, with much less RSI and eye strain.
Magazines, newspapers, short stories and other short-form written paper works pre-digital age are as guilty (or not guilty) of changing the consumption experience the author attempts to pin on 'digital'.
When it comes to the cultural impact of what we consume, there is I think a quantity vs quality argument that can be made with the introduction of digital and the lowering of barriers. There is also a counter argument that 'quality' was subjectively gate-kept by small groups that colour and bias the narrative intentionally and unintentionally. The weighing of these two arguments seems to come down to personal views on culture and media and I find its often a grey area for many.