Same As It Ever Was

 It was movies. And then it was radio. And then it was TV. Greetings from the TV Grneration. 👋 Then it was the internet. Now…

It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. It’s the phones. https://t.co/VUFwbPjItM

— Stefan Smith (@TheStefanSmith) September 25, 2025

It’s almost amusing to see somebody “discover” something that’s been true for generations, and decide it’s just leapt full grown from the brow of Zeus. Although, as the Great Silkie of Schulz Skerry tells the mother of his child, this new creation is not comely.

You don’t even have to know anything about the last 100 years in America. Teach freshman English for a semester. The first time I did (in graduate school), I assigned a Woody Allen essay about revolutions. The shortest essay in the textbook, and basically a page and a half of one-liners. They loathed it, because the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution meant nothing to them. Not. One. Thing. I assigned it because getting them to read (and learn from) the essays in the textbook was almost impossible.

Years later I was teaching freshman English again, and by contrast with my students 4 decades earlier, these almost uniformly didn’t read at all, and didn’t want to. Their knowledge of what I considered cultural touchstones (Romeo and Juliet, etc.) were all but unknown to them. And getting them to read? At all?

Well, frankly, it wasn’t that much worse than the mass of students in my high school. My friends read, as I did. But almost nobody else I knew, or knew of, did. Or if they did, they didn’t really want anyone to know it.

So forget blaming the phones, or technology in any form. Blame inertia. Blame disinterest. Understand that most people, like electricity, seek the path of least resistance. Compared to some of my oldest friends, I still do.

So it goes.