I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology.

But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.

I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.

That is also true for me on struggling to complete books, but don't forget when books first become cheap there were letters to the newspapers deploring that young people were reading rather than 'living' by talking with friends or going to the theatre.

I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).

Re: books

Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly.

I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page.

However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible.

It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.

Things are coming so much faster now.

Writing has been around for thousands of years. But it caught on extremely slowly. It took thousands of years to spread across the globe. For thousands of years being literate was rare. The printing press changed things a lot, but books and the education needed to use them remained uncommon. Until pretty recently, a person’s daily life looked a lot like their grandparents’ did.

Things started picking up. Electricity went from zero to ubiquitous in a few generations. So did mechanized transport, radio, TV, and telephones.

It’s faster than that today. Most people today communicate using systems that didn’t exist at all when I was a child. At work, we’re all using tools that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

The “check back in a few centuries” doesn’t work, because we’re not going to be using the same stuff in a few centuries. We’re probably not going to be using the same stuff in a few decades. We didn’t have time to figure out the ramifications of doomscrolling before it became ubiquitous, and we’ll probably have even less time to figure out the next thing.

Agreed.

As a society, we have this silly habit of dismissing criticisms of incoming societal shifts because previous ones “turned out fine”. We grab the most extreme of the bad contrarian takes of the time and use it to ridicule the position as a whole. We often ignore those previous shifts were influenced by the criticisms of the time (not all of them bad) and that how it turned out was a result of the push and pull.

In other words, we need to have the people pointing out the bad parts of the change, to have any chance that it’ll actually turn out good.

Another thing often ignored is that shifts are happening more frequently and at larger scales, and we’ve seen them become out of control. All the more reason to take a breather a move slower.