[Penforhire]

Maybe Sven Birkerts was just a poor teacher or his students were a sub-par cross section. It remains anecdotal evidence anyway, not any sort of scientific study.

C'mon! When we were in school we were surrounded by clueless students regardless of when we attended school. It might vary for special schools and programs but I recall a distribution of readers back when I attended school that anyone could have griped about equally without blaming the "age" they lived in. G.O.M. indeed.

Calling the Sony reader a "fatuous device" firmly establishes Andrew Cowan's blind bias.

I'll agree we live an an era of more noise and less signal. That just means we learn to discriminate and multi-task. Some people master the art of web searches and some founder.

His article recalls the cry of generations past, "kids these days..."

edit - As a side note, does this author carve his works on stone tablets? Or does he consider the typewriter and word processor to be worthy advances for a writer to use? Makes me wonder.