“Intellectual and cultural knowledge of the kind we used to acquire off-line, at a slower pace, in a less distractible and distracted mode, are threatened with extinction as new waves of data, in unmanageable quantity, come online. The subtler properties of language, its potential for irony and its connotative richness, whose apprehension requires sustained and careful attention, are at risk when speed of access and ease of understanding are at a premium. The consequences of this for literary and philosophical writing are obvious; less obvious, but intimately connected, is the damage done to language as a means of careful argument, including political argument.”