The analysis feels quite wrong just based on pure physics. Where has that curiosity, interest, and engaged thought gone? It has not simply vanished into the screen without heat loss, it is transformed energy. The mind's eye may no longer be fixed on glyphs on paper but it certainly has not closed. Kids these days are fluent in languages of memes and rich with visual experience. Just because tiktoks are a few seconds long doesn't mean there is nothing in them. Perhaps the vogue visual learning of today is more in common with "trashy pulp fiction" but there isn't nothing at all there as the article suggests.

There will be some challenge in adapting to this new format but attention remains. We are just not converting this new medium into the best educational content as seen in the declining graphs. People are still hungry for knowledge and information about the world, they are just getting it in a more convenient form and who can blame them? I personally do not engage in any of the endless scroll feeds available today and despise social media. I read books both in digital and physical form and I graduated right near the peak of that literacy chart around 2009.

We just need to find better incentives for content creation and the rest will follow on it's own. Often this can only be done with regulation but what regulation can improve the quality of short form media? It will likely take those who grew up steeped in it to imagine the best way to change it for their own children.