"... but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When I get going in this vein, my 16-year-old son says: 'Face it, Dad, you’re just an old man shaking your fist at the cloud.'* Yet I don’t regard myself as opposed to the new media technologies in any way at all—nor do I view them as 'bad,' let alone as cultural panopathogens.** I’ve no doubt that human intelligence will continue to be pretty much the same as it has heretofore—but the particular form of intelligence associated with book-learning (and all that this entails) is undoubtedly on the wane, with the 'extended mind' of the smart phone increasingly replacing our own memories, and the hive-mindedness of the web usurping our notions of the canonical.... [T]he most salient features of the contemporary world are its relentlessness and its atemporality—the web bundles up everything into a permanent Now... Modish neuroscientists do such things as put people in brain-scanners while they’re actually reading—then marvel (as we should too), at how many areas of the cortex are involved in turning those enigmatic black marks into the stuff of our imagination and experience. But some texts are clearly going to be a better jungle gym for the mind than others—and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown."

Writes the novelist Will Self at Literary Hub.

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* The boy knows his memes. See Know Your Meme. Requisite image:



** New word alert.