Some ideas I got from listening to a conversation between Ezra Klein and Nicholas Carr:^[Klein, Ezra. “How Technology Literally Changes Our Brains.” Vox, July 1, 2020. https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klein-show-the-shallows-twitter-facebook-attention-deep-reading-thinking.] As children learn to read text, more and more of their visual cortex is dedicated to the task of reading. These neurons are unavailable for the kinds of reading that pre-textual cultures would have excelled at, such as navigating by the stars or the patterns of ocean currents.^[John Edward Huth, Lost Art of Finding Our Way.] Marshall McLuhan believed that the printing press (c. 1440) was a major revolution, because it made us sit down and read. This was not a group activity, although in the 21st century this might finally be solved with technology.^[Silent Synchronous Reading Sessions: https://maggieappleton.com/silentsessions] As a result, people removed themselves from the social world. This made us more individualistic. Reading also made our visual sense more dominant over the other senses, and we became more alienated from other people and the world itself.