This is an excellent article on the fall of intellect and the rise of zombie-ism.

Today’s teenagers certainly read all day — memes, posts, tweets — but it is all of a transitory, casual nature. Reading books has been sacrificed to the tyranny of texting and the dizzying array of social media platforms.

… Now they endlessly scroll through their social media feeds, often in isolated silence.

Sherry Turkle, who specializes in the psychology of human interaction with technology, wrote some books and did a great Ted Talk on this topic, years before this became an overwhelming problem. (2011) She talked about how this zombie interaction with technology changes the way our brains are ‘wired.’

I see it everyday – I watch people and how they become hypnotized by the digital medium. They become transfixed and unproductive. And I also deal with this problem with the young folks who work for me, picking up and putting down their phones constantly, with their work not getting done. Digital zombie-ism is a brain-changer and a productivity disrupter. And then there came the term “binge-watching” — and people view that as a virtue and they actually brag about it.

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