The fragmentary nature of online content is what makes it harmful. A book is a narrative that builds upon some basic terms and contexts. A LinkedIn post with some condensed life wisdom avoids any context and many of the “ifs”. Consuming thousands of these won’t allow you to come up with cohesive explanatory models, either. More likely, you will get confused, overwhelmed and possibly angry.

Most kids are addicted to social media, and algorithms there are optimized to feed attention-grabbing garbage. At least in my country there's a clear link between smartphone use in classroom and worsening educational outcomes. We're also enjoying a surge in ADHD diagnosis of small children, as well as mental healt crisis among teenagers, which I suspect have a lot to do with excessive smartphone and social media usage.

I agree that lots of books are garbage too, but they still require some amount of focus and attention, which makes them much, much less bad for brain development than watching TikTok videos all day.

Do you really think it's "both garbage and high-value content"?

From what I've seen it's either or. It seems the exception that a kid or teenager will watch a healthy mix of both.

I agree that lots of books and long-form content could be summarised, but if you ever read a book than watched the movie adaptation, you can understand that even though there's not necessarily a lot of value being lost, there can be.

Also, I think book reading helps a lot with your attention span and capacity to engage with content for a long time. I think the problem is not assigning books to read to those kids, its assigning the wrong ones. Any kid can get absorbed by a book where they can relate to the characters.

I can't fathom what kind of mental gymnastics one must go through to tout the widespread loss of functional literacy to be a good thing. I suppose you also believe we were all better off as cavemen and that humanity was a mistake?

Plenty of hypothesizing recently that literacy as we know it might have been a merely an intermediate phase in human civilization, between total lack of literacy and future human–human communication or human–computer interfacing through emoji-rich shortform text and voice. And even well before the rise of the smartphone, one might have occasionally heard in nerd circles that boring prose literature is superseded by manga: “look at what Japanese people are reading on the train, and their society is doing fine”.