> You haven't even attempted to address whether various developments in society and technology might do this to literacy the way earlier trends did to musical s

> You haven't even attempted to address whether various developments in society and technology might do this to literacy the way earlier trends did to musical skills. I think that result is quite likely, by the way. Fair, I was making a different point. Yes literacy might be reduced, my argument is that this isn’t necessarily a problem. Our abilities shift to take advantage of technology. A lot like how we got really bad at memorizing long epics because we can just write them down instead. That said, I don’t think writing/literacy will go away as much as we might fear. The new technologies are not a good enough replacement (yet?)