The book I’ve written on the toll digital tools have taken on the intellectual lives and advanced literacy (not basic literacy) of the young has garnered a fair degree of coverage, and among the negative responses has run a discordant motif. The thesis of the book is that screen technologies (as customarily used by teens) have damaged their reading habits, hurt their writing, and weakened their respect for historical and civic knowledge — a contention that, of course, invites debate. But one of the common critical replies is a simple, flat assertion that, in effect, shuts down the question of whether and how digital technology closes the young American mind.

Call it the “ho-hum” response. It says, “Well, we’ve heard this kind of thing forever, so there’s no need to get excited.” In this case, it follows two tacks. One, it says that the old have rebuked the young for their puerile tastes ever since the ancients, as with this piece in Newsweek; and two, it says that alarmists have fretted over technology ever since the advent of writing (and the printing press, telephone, TV, etc.), as with this piece in Wired magazine. So, claims about new technology and wayward kids shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The handwringers and curmudgeons have sounded them many times before.

One could argue over the specific merits of each ho-hum, but the discordance doesn’t lie in the accuracy of the assertions. Instead, it lies in the contrast between the downplaying, “this-routine-has-a-long-history” reflections and the radical, revolutionary qualities attributed loudly to the current technologies and to the rising generation. For the enthusiasts of Web 2.0 and of the Millennials often claim that the current situation marks precisely a rupture in history, a great leap forward that makes comparisons with the past inapt.

Here are some typical statements (which I included in the book).

Futurist Mark Prensky maintains that “The unprecedented changes in technology … have led to new patterns of thinking, especially in young people.”

Video game expert James Gee says that when he first started playing, “Suddenly all my baby-boomer ways of learning and thinking, for which I had heretofore received ample rewards, did not work.”

Game Scientist David Williamson Shaffer believes that computers alter “the way people think in the digital age,” and he rates their advent with “the development of language itself.”

Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, thinks that the “Read/Write Web” is “changing our relationship to technology and rewriting the age old paradigm of how things work.”

Jon Katz declared in a landmark essay in Wired magazine back in 1997, “the digital young are revolutionaries. Unlike the clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they’re making one.”

In his Time magazine Person of the Year (“You”) article, Lev Grossman announced, “The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in Reason magazine that, “as with Amazon, Google, and eBay, it is almost impossible to remember how much more circumscribed out world was before [Wikipedia] existed.”

These declarations cast the Digital Age as a break with the past, and the Digital Native, too. They circulate freely among the techno-cognoscenti, and it is striking how blithely they are uttered and accepted. If they are true, however, then the worries of traditionalists, cultural conservatives, bibliophiles, and the rest can’t be dismissed as just the latest form of Luddite alarm. If Web 2.0 marks something fundamentally, radically different in the nature of knowledge and the means of intelligence, and if the young are the lead carriers of the revolution, then the “kids-are-alright, everything’s-okay, stop-the-handwringing” response doesn’t apply. If a revolution is in play, one that reaches down into the hard wiring of thought, it’s not a version of the same old thing. And if the critical reaction to it addresses aspects specific to Web 2.0 and teens’ standard use of it, let’s not pooh-pooh it with easy comparisons to Socrates and the fear of writing.