Kimberly Hibbert

The dilemma is clear in medical schools, which are encouraging students to use LLMs, even as conscientious students will have to take care that their skills advance alongside AI rather than atrophy in the presence of the technology. “I’m worried these tools will erode my ability to make an independent diagnosis,” Benjamin Popokh, a medical student... See more

The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students... If reading and writing “rewired” the logic engine of the human brain, the decline of reading and writing are unwiring our cognitive superpower at the... See more

Our goal must be to deliberately, and flexibly, maintain conditions where sustained attention remains valued.

The actors and audiences of William Shakespeare’s plays were engaging in an activity that was considered “low-brow” and even unethical by many members of their society . Shakespeare’s theater, The Globe, was ultimately shut down in 1642 in a final win for the long-standing Puritan campaign against drama. One of Shakespeare’s primary competitors, in... See more

Newport’s warning echoes an observation made by the scholar Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy . According to Ong, literacy is no passing skill. It was a means of restructuring human thought and knowledge to create space for complex ideas. Stories can be memorized by people who cannot read or write. But nothing as advanced as, say,... See more

But in the long run, societies don’t simply survive new media technologies passively. They negotiate with them. The eighteenth-century audiences who worried about novels didn’t stop reading them. Instead, they developed new practices for understanding what to get out of them. Eventually, they canonized some novels as “literature” worth sustained... See more

Other research has shown that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests.

As a historian, though, I think there is one big thing missing from discussions of whether we are witnessing the end of books — or really, the age of sustained attention on anything .

“Mass market” books and periodicals were, themselves , once assailed as damaging to mental health, to attention, and to society.

We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us.