It can be all of those things and it can be smartphones.

Let's get a couple things out of the way:

1) "literacy" has had a pretty floppy definition over the years. As Kamil Galeev pointed out, "Literacy" in the 18th century was "can you write your name?" while Marriott uses this piece of shit to argue that "Literacy" in the 21st century is "can you have erudite conversations with a peer after a cold read of the first page of Bleak House?"

2) Every weepy pissy screed from the intelligentsia about "kids" and "school" from now until 2037 is going to have to deal with COVID and its impacts and you'll notice none of them ever do.

It is fair to point a finger at phones and all they provide because they are designed to suck up your attention like a needy toddler. Tik Tok is the worst - it only has firehose mode. But it's absolutely not fair to say the kids aren't reading Keats, therefore kick-me-in-the-balls channel.

For starters, this MFer throws goddamn Neil Postman into the mix not once, not twice, but EIGHT FUCKING TIMES without even once making note of the fact that he was discussing broadcast television... before the dawn of cable... three years before the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. Fucking Neil Postman would have been horrified of WIKIPEDIA because the very idea of hypertext was anathema to him:

From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the printed word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

^^^^^^^^^^^some dipshit who never heard of yellow journalism

Like how Walter Ong comes along for good measure? Yeah, Marriott never quotes Ong directly, he quotes Ong as quoted by Postman and pretends it's a primary citation. Kinda like how he says (Bleak House) is "a book that was once regularly read by children" because George Orwell mentioned that David Copperfield was in libraries in 1940.

But the real bullshit in this article is how he fuckin' makes up history, like how "capitalism" started with the printing press (rather than the Medicis and their ilk) and how books-would-save-us-if-only without noting that we have Jordan Peterson because of his books, for example. ZOMFG! David Bowie read Faulkner! Paul McCartney reads Ibsen! We'd all be saved if only Taylor Swift picked up some Hawthorne... Oh wait, she did and does?

Well shit.

Every five or ten years, some dumb fuck reads Postman, loses his shit, decries the modern world and points at Cranky Grandpa from 1984 (not "the late 80s", not even vaguely) as a prophet and visionary of our ongoing literary collapse. This is primarily because their other choice is to look at McLuhan, who was four years dead by the time Postman was losing his shit, and who argued that it isn't about books it's about communication and if they do that then they have to shut the fuck up about the Zoomers that didn't make their latte correctly.

But why aren't the kids reading?

It's been pointed out that Millennials didn't read, they read Harry Potter. Dipshits like Marriott love to point at "the classics" as if they're something kids used to pick up on their own, rather than something ten generations of English teachers have beaten them over the head with and I don't care whose "best books" list you look at, the least dead author on there is usually Toni Morrison and are you seriously bitching that more kids aren't picking up a 300-page screed about slavery and child abuse? Or is it the Kafka they should be picking up voluntarily? Ulysses? The fuckin' classic of my age was Flowers in the Attic which was creepy and terrible and utterly without literary value and the only reason all these 'boomers are championing Stephen King these days is to get back at their parents for calling it dreck when it was new.

Which circles back to your first point(s) - why the fuck would they engage with any of this shit? Everyone under 30 is terrified of global warming, everyone over 50 doesn't believe in it. The economic structure that put their grandparents in their home is utterly unavailable to them. We traded quaaludes for cocaine for meth for heroin for fentanyl, we traded free love for AIDs for incels. I didn't link to this yesterday but maybe I should have; the fundamental argument is that the political ideology most common among young people is nihilism.

It's pretty fuckin' funny that Marriott wrote that whole Postman-linked-seven-times screed and didn't bring up brainrot even once. Which pretty much gives lie to this entire category of essay - it's all GenXers whining about how Facebook isn't fun anymore and Millennials pissed off that there's nothing on Instagram or else they'd actually take a quick look at these kids they're mourning. Brainrot is real - my daughter's school puts you on time-out if you use it and the two Johns in her class are distinguished by their fellow pupils as "John" and "Brainrot John."

So what is it? If you ask a concern troll, it's "mental decline from consuming too much low quality content." If you ask a kid, it's pointless memes. What does 67 mean? Nothing, that's the joke. What's a Skibidi? It isn't, that's the point. Why is something Ohio? Why isn't something Ohio. Going with McLuhan here - the medium is the message, and the message is "we're here and all this shit is pointless." Errbody losing their shit about Skydance buying Paramount without noticing that it's basically the Taylor Sheridan Channel. Errbody losing their shit over ABC censoring Kimmel without noticing that Disney is three theme parks, a cruise line, Marvel and Star Wars. Andor? Andor is your countercultural must watch? Fanfic set in a universe based on Feudal Japan? 67.

Before it was 67 it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Each and every generation marking "present" for their friends while being castigated by their parents for not reading the Iliad in the original Greek. There's a period right before the next generation takes power where the current generation in power goes "OHHHHHHHH SHIT THEY'RE GOING TO FUCK IT UP ROYALLY" and frankly, that's only been true once.

These essays always freak out about the decline of standard testing by ignoring the recovery. They freak out about the impact of social media while ignoring that nobody uses it anymore, especially kids. They freak out about phones without acknowledging the groundswell against phones in schools is happening ten times faster than the death of tobacco. Scratch each and every one of these essays and you will find a boomer, a GenXer or a millennial reframing his (always his) discomfort with his impending cultural irrelevance. Millennials used to be super-proud of the fact that they were "digital natives" until GenZ went "fuck social media." GenX used to be super-proud of being at the dawn of social media until they discovered they'll be there for its sunset. Boomers dominated television in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s but that also means they dominated it through the '00s, '10s and '20s which is why Cathy Bates is playing Matlock, Carrie Preston is playing Columbo, and every.possible.entertainment.venue is serving up nostalgia for an era kids never lived through.

I think millennials are particularly sensitive to this shit because they fucking lapped up the branding and advertising their parents the 'boomers served up to them and GenZ and Gen Alpha are absolutely positively not doing that. I think GenX mostly just pisses and moans about the decline of Western civilization because their comfy place is Reality Bites and Breakfast Club. The thing about nihilism is it's the clean slate before the ideology. "fuck everything" is where every socially-awake teenager lives and then they go through Marx and Rand and Marquez and come up with a worldview. These essays exist because the kids are rejecting the current worldview.

They should.

It's terrible.

Does that mean the END OF THE MUTHERFUCKING WORLD?

GTFO.