In Defense of the Smartphone

      James Marriott has composed a particularly eloquent elegy for reading, now that humanity seems to be turning in another direction: toward screening—toward the smartphone. Marriott’s elegy is also particularly frightening, for he sees “the post-literate world [as] characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.” This website excerpted a chunk of Marriott’s depressing argument the day before the essay you are now reading is being published.

      And how can any of us whose thoughts have been formed in large part by newspapers, magazines and books—by descriptions and propositions, by sentences—not feel some sadness watching them being made redundant. How can we avoid some disquiet about the ongoing triumph of that flickering, know-it-all, video-jukebox-busybody, smart-alecky phone—to whose siren song even we often enough succumb?  

      . . . But I wanted to hear Marriott out not because he is right but because his argument—which is showing up in many forms lately, forms not often as literate and eloquent—is, I believe, profoundly and importantly and demonstrably wrong. . . .