I think this is a pretty lazy dismissal as far as things go. Yes people "always complain" about many things, but that's the correct response to things that are always getting worse.

The gist of your linked article is that they were opposed to reading because they believed that reading distracted people from labor, which they considered undisciplined and immoral. Of course there also seems to be a healthy dose of misogyny associated with it:

> Poeckel's statement that women should acquire a certain amount of knowledge, but not too much, because then they could become a "burden on human society," is representative of many other texts in which reading regulations played a central role.

Then once you get to the progression of books > comics > movies > Youtube > TikTok (did I miss any?), you can observe a steady decrease in the amount of cognitive effort required to engage with the medium and a reduction in attention spans. Reduced attention span is a legitimate concern and it's only getting worse as time goes on (ask teachers).

I actually enjoy TikTok in moderation these days but I worry about people who struggle to engage with anything but TikTok, it's like a generational ratchet that only seems to go one way, towards shorter and shorter attention spans.

Maybe someone can make the argument that this won't actually matter, but it's incorrect to say that things haven't changed in observable and measurable ways, and that people are just complaining about nothing.

Am I that old already? I just turned 29 a few months ago.

While I believe that long form content such as YouTube essays can actually be intellectually stimulating depending on how you engage with the video itself (e.g. do you actively watch it, or do you just have it on in the background?), I truly believe that 95% of TikTok is just mindless slop.

My S.O. probably spends 3 hours a day on TikTok/Reels and I seriously doubt they could remember even 10% of what they saw in that time. It's like a part of their brain turns off while scrolling.