Fully in agreement with your take on this. One small clarification, however. >You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you? In our day and

Fully in agreement with your take on this. One small clarification, however. >You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you? In our day and age, you wouldn't. But this was definitely a thing in 1800s (regarding books) and in early 1900s (regarding newspapers). Using very similar excuses to rant about those, as the excuses being used today regarding screens too. And even earlier, in Ancient Greece, tons of prolific philosophers were strongly opposed to writing and books as a concept, as they believed that writing things down and learning from that (as opposed to oral learning) was eroding abilities that relied on memory (which parallels really well with people currently complaining about search engines removing the hard need for memorizing things). However, knowing this only makes your original point stronger.