Yes, I agree, the shift from reading to writing is pronounced, and probably profound. After the Internet went mainstream, for the first time in history, large

Yes, I agree, the shift from reading to writing is pronounced, and probably profound. After the Internet went mainstream, for the first time in history, large number of people write every day, people who wouldn't have, in comparable social station, have written in the past. Who wrote in the past? Pupils, students, lawyers and some other professionals. Most, would have stopped writing prose after finishing school or university. Moreover, very few would have written voluntarily, only as part of a job, or as part of education. For the majority of the population, all voluntary, fun, hedonic communication (in the narrow, everyday sense) was spoken. This is now very different. I used to think that writing makes us smarter (because it asks us to think carefully, to look at the writing from many perspectives, to try and produce truth, since writing is preserved and likely seen by others), and so had high hopes for humanity ... ... then came Twitter ... and I realised that it's not writing as such that has these effects, but rather social expectations (as for example embodied in the career structure of scientists) in concert with writing that account for those positive effects.