We are reading more crap. I read tons of blogs, HN, reddit, and useless stuff every day. Seems important, but not. We are overloaded with shallow information. When I was young and there was no internet, getting access to information, especially one with depth was a delight. It opened up a new world, where your imagination went to work. Today, there are very few things that wow and have my mind racing as it did when I was much younger. The same applies to kids today, with TV/Internet they have somehow seen it all, even if it's just at the surface level, so very few get drawn to dig in deeper.
I find my active creativity is _much_ higher when reading well thought out print material like the New Yorker, fiction OR non-fiction book. My mind races with new creations and combinations. This rarely happens with online material which favors the NOW instead of the good. One cannot subsist off of newspapers and blogs along, they are deficient in all the nutrients the mind needs.
The thoughts are shallow and hurried with repetitive easy to digest truisms. A single sentence expanded to fill an entire article.
Reading something deeply takes work. Writing it even more.
