Reading James Marriott's piece feels like standing at the bedside of someone beloved who isn't actually dying. The monitors are beeping, yes, and the numbers have changed, but the diagnosis rests on a fundamental misrecognition of what's happening in the body. Marriott sees the transformation of how we engage with ideas and mistakes it for death. He mourns the supposed collapse of civilisation while missing the more complex metamorphosis actually underway.

The most telling moment in his argument comes when he describes pre-literate societies as "mystical, emotional, and antagonistic" in their thinking, as though these qualities were inherently inferior to the cool rationality of print. This reveals the deeper assumption threading through his entire piece: that there is one proper way for humans to think, and it happens to be the way that emerged during a particular historical moment when bound paper objects held monopoly power over serious thought.

As a librarian, I spend my days watching how people actually navigate the landscape of knowledge and what I see doesn't match Marriott's catastrophic portrait. Yes, people struggle with traditional books more than they used to. But I also watch teenagers conduct sophisticated research across multiple platforms, synthesising video essays, academic papers, podcasts, and primary sources with a fluency that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. They struggle with Dickens not because they've lost the capacity for complex thought, but because they've developed different cognitive muscles for different kinds of complexity.

Marriott's piece commits the cardinal sin of conflating correlation with causation when he links literacy rates to democratic revolutions and scientific progress. These transformations emerged from a complex web of economic, social, and technological changes, of which print was certainly important but hardly sufficient. The printing press didn't create the Enlightenment any more than the smartphone created populism. Both technologies amplified existing human tendencies and created new possibilities, but neither determines our fate.

The deeper problem with the declinist narrative is that it treats reading as synonymous with thinking itself. This is historically myopic. Socrates famously worried that writing would destroy memory and genuine understanding, replacing lived wisdom with dead letters. Medieval scholars developed elaborate arts of memory that we've entirely lost. Oral cultures maintain knowledge traditions of extraordinary sophistication without written texts. Each transformation in how we handle information involves genuine losses alongside new capabilities. The question isn't whether we're declining but what we're becoming.

What particularly troubles me about Marriott's argument is how it reinforces a kind of intellectual gatekeeping that libraries have been working to dismantle for decades. When we insist that serious thought can only happen through traditional academic texts, we exclude enormous numbers of people who process information differently. The dyslectic student who thrives with audiobooks, the visual learner who understands complex systems through interactive graphics, the kinaesthetic thinker who needs to build and manipulate ideas physically: none of these minds are inferior, yet Marriott's framework implicitly dismisses them as symptoms of civilisational decline.

The real crisis isn't that people can't focus. It's that we've built information environments actively hostile to contemplation while simultaneously lamenting the loss of contemplative practices. We've created attention casinos and then diagnosed the players with moral weakness. This is a design problem masquerading as a cultural catastrophe.

Consider what actually happens in a modern library. We don't just house books anymore. We create what I think of as "containers for attention": spaces and practices that enable different kinds of engagement with ideas. The silent reading room remains sacred, but it's joined by maker spaces where people think with their hands, recording studios where oral traditions find new life, collaborative zones where knowledge emerges through conversation. We're not abandoning literacy. We're expanding what literacy means.

Marriott is right that we're living through a profound transformation. Where he sees collapse, though, I see metamorphosis. The challenge isn't to preserve the aristocracy of print but to democratise the conditions for deep thought across all modes of engagement. This means designing information environments that support sustained attention, teaching people to navigate multiple modes of meaning fluently, and recognising that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain.

The future Marriott fears, where we're all reduced to emotional, reactive creatures of the feed, is certainly one possibility. But it's not inevitable. The teenagers I see who code while listening to philosophy podcasts, who annotate videos with critical commentary, who create elaborate multimedia presentations synthesising dozens of sources: they're not the degraded shadows of their literate ancestors. They're developing new forms of intellectual engagement that we're only beginning to understand.

The question isn't whether civilisation will survive the death of traditional literacy. It's whether we'll have the wisdom and imagination to build institutions, practices, and spaces that support human flourishing in an age where meaning moves through light and sound as readily as through ink. That's the real work ahead, and it's far more interesting than mourning a monopoly that was always going to end.