That's might be because of thinking of first order effects only.
>Sure, smartphones provide access to almost unlimited trash. But they also provide access to Wikipedia, perhaps the most successful encyclopedia ever developed by humans.
Well, who said access to Wikipedia is something good in itself? For one, it might (and I say it does) reduce the number of deeper study on a subject, because of "I can look it up in Wikipedia". So, people that get interested in something don't need to build a deeper connection with their subject, buy books, follow it over time, connect with other people studying it, as a basic (and often crude) summary is always at small distance, and is perceived as enough.
What's worse, there's a whole new entitlement and arrogance about topics, from people who have just cursory experience with them from Wikipedia or some other such source, and feed as qualified on them as actual people who've studied them/experts. Wikipedia feeds the "Read 1 lemma for 5 minutes expert".
It's even worse when the source of their knowledge is not Wikipedia, but random web BS pages -- from conspiracy theories to homeopathy pages to alternative diets, to plain old bad journalist/click-baits.
>They can show you newspapers from across the planet. They let you read Latin histories of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy in the middle ages.
Both quite irrelevant to the discussion (which is about mass effects), as only a tiny outlier group will ever read those anyway.
It's not the internet/smartphone that is the real problem though. It's that as a civilization we've relinquished control to structures whose only motives are profit-making.
Their "we're changing the world" lip-service always has that ("to make more money") proviso -- not "for the better".