What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

But in a ​recent podcast appearance​, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London ,summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades.