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Why were "they" wrong? Is it because the issues of each successive development in mass media made those of the previous iteration look quaint? It's easy to look back on (for example) TV as a harmless diversion, but it was a radical development in the dissemination of visual information.

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Also this is a funny argument. If these things are truly making people dumber but the change is happening on a generational level, then a dumber generation would not realize that it is dumber than the previous one.

It's also further muddied by other changes - like changes in education in the past 50 years - which makes the phenomenon harder to isolate and to judge.

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