On the other hand I wouldn't equate voracious reading with intellectualism. I read more as a kid, but as I age and life gets in the way, my ADHD is devouring me. However, as a kid who read books and hung with other kids who read books, none of us were reading very challenging material, and the self-professed child bookworms still dedicate their life to Harry fucking Potter and other books that are easily digestible for a teen. Equating reading with intellectualism also completely devalues oral and visual storytelling, and the fact that the vast majority of people we would consider objectively curious and even intellectual throughout history were illiterate. And this is coming from me, with my degree in English literature and linguistics.
Don't take your literacy for granted. There are people still alive in the Western world this very day who would run circles around you in philosophical arguments, whose reading skills are very low, or who are completely illiterate. Written word is a tool. Engaging with literature might indicate curiosity and intellectual leaning, but in the end the written word is merely the proverbial fork: an invention that became available to the masses only relatively recently. Doesn't mean people who don't use forks, or lived before forks were available to the masses, would be stupid or intellectually incurious. It simply means that they obtain and analyse info in different ways.
Furthermore, there is apparently evidence that literacy becoming widespread has significantly changed or even hamstrung our memory. When you have no real need to store vast amounts of data (and analyse it) by memorising because you don't have the skills to write it down and reading, you no longer train yourself to remember. This is what I mean when I say that someone who might be entirely illiterate, can still match your pace intellectually. Though they are at a disadvantage now, because we increasingly abandon oral tradition and practical experience in favour of simply reading about it.
Reading is good. It exercises your brain. But you are not necessarily the king of eating just because you're dexterous with a knife and a fork. Eating is eating. Info acquisition and analysis is info acquisition and analysis. Reading makes you reader, not necessarily an intellectual. The only real argument there is really is the fact that literacy is so widely used that it renders other info acquisition, retention and analysis skills if not obsolete, then harder to work with, when they aren't necessarily worse at all.
Plenty of great historic minds read limping both legs and vastly preferred diction. Reading and writing was simply convenient for data storage and dissemination to a wider audience, I would argue. We just don't know, just how ferocious people were intellectually, because their knowledge wasn't stored in writing, and died out in parts of the world along with oral tradition.
And this is before we get into an argument over what 'intellectualism' even entails.
and i would also really fucking like it, if we started treating short form media induced ADD as a legitimate point of concern and discussion, not as a cudgel and a character flaw to take a shit on children with. You can bray all about 'oh but I blame the parents'. Well, the kids can still fucking hear you when you call them names and ascribe negative character traits to them as a thinly veiled moral judgment. They can hear you! You're taking shots at their parents, catching kids in the crossfire. 'You're an attention deficient dumbfuck but it's ok, it's your mom's fault' is cold comfort to a child who's forced to grow up and become educated in a world that changes with every morning shit you take.
So, tell me, o' intellectual. Why do you sound like an oldtimer who whinges about how we don't have it as good as it was, whilst displaying an aggressive failure to adapt to the new reality yourself? Things have changed and are still changing, and you yourself never get past identifying the problem. Because that'd require some flexibility, and stretching sucks balls.
A lot of you sound like the people who had a conniption over the advent of newspapers. Technology can bring up some new pressure points, but over time, calluses grow, people adapt, old ways are abandoned, new are born, and old ways rise again. See: the debate among literature enthusiasts over audiobooks, which apparently don't count as books because you use your ears instead of eyes.
Mind you i'm being incredibly surface level here. This debate cannot even remotely be distilled into a single shitty tumblr post, half of this here is just me being facetious anyway.
