The first thing you notice is the noise. A phone blinks, an auto-caption mishears you, a chatbot volunteers a better verb than the one you just chose, and the room you’re in—classroom, newsroom, living room—hums like a server bay. A century ago, literacy meant the quiet mastery of marks on paper; today it’s more like air-traffic control. You scan and triage. You decide what deserves your finite attention and what can be offloaded to the machines waiting—the cursor blinking. Herbert Simon saw this coming in 1971: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”¹
We didn’t just get more information; we got a different kind of scarcity—our own attention.
Walk down a high school corridor in 2025 and you’ll see that scarcity in motion. Phones aren’t just distractions; they’re competitors. In Texas, a district board fought over how strict a phone ban should be; in Houston, one all-boys school banned devices entirely. Most parents backed the move. Not because they’re Luddites—because they see what constant scrolling does to attention, to conversation, to reading stamina.¹⁰
Teachers aren’t anti-tech—they’re pro-attention.
So what’s actually changing when our reading becomes a sprint instead of a swim?
We lose nuance. Studies comparing screens to paper show something subtle but consistent: comprehension drops when we scroll instead of slowing down and engaging. The faster we skim, the more likely we are to miss inference, tone, or layered meaning. And we’re worse at noticing the gap. On screens, readers tend to overestimate how much they’ve understood—especially when time is tight or the material is dense.³⁴
Speed feels like mastery. But speed lies.
There’s a name for what comes next: the Google Effect. When we know we can look something up, we stop remembering it. Instead of storing facts, we store where to find them. That trade—recall for retrieval—is efficient.