You bet, and I'm just as guilty as the next person, more or less.  I mess around on the computer every day, not all day like some I know, but every day for a while, anyway.  Even though I don't do dumb things like fakebork and the like, I still waste time when I should be doing other things.  But today's younger generation is the worst, and they're going to end up paying a huge price for their screen time.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE:


"Larry Sand, in an article published last Sunday at American Greatness, notes that:

In 1840, before compulsory public schools existed, literacy rates were about 90 percent.

But today?

According to the Literacy Project, 45 million Americans today are functionally illiterate, unable to read above a 5th-grade level. Half of all adults can’t read a book at an 8th-grade level. In California, 25 percent of the state’s 6 million students are unable to perform basic reading skills…. 

What are the causes of this grim decline? Undoubtedly there are many: the statist takeover of schools at the local level; incompetent teachers; lazy students; lazy parents who fail to keep their children accountable; dumbed-down, uniform curricula (in part in order to promote equal outcomes, or less unequal outcomes, among racial groups).The most unexpected cause, I should say, is the digital revolution that in the past few decades has transformed not only our way of life, but perhaps also human nature itself. Aided—or perhaps hindered—by our new technology, we are perpetually multitasking. Yet according to the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”

In the words of the neurologist Richard Cytowic,

"We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle, while in the background we have to stay ever vigilant to change in every sensory channel…. Screens of all sorts serve up rapidly changing images, jump cuts between scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out in fragments…. Is it any wonder people today complain of mental fatigue? Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the salient and navigate the glut of decisions modern life throws at us."

We are, one might say, embarked on a kind of strange technological experiment whose effects we are far from fully understanding."

https://www.takimag.com/article/digital-dumb-dumbs/

***  Some of the articles off to the right-hand side of the page are worth reading, too.