The Q&A with Professor Christy Wampole (“The End of Irony,” Life of the Mind, Oct. 7) struck a powerful chord in me. Technology is supposed to be a help to us, but often gets in the way of real interactions. We are conditioned to respond to sound bites when we should consider profound questions. We observe rather than create. We engage in “shouting cleverly” in social media, not knowing how it affects our readers.

Our media fuel this life. Movies, TV shows, and commercials are constructed more than ever with frenetic scenes that are no more than a couple of seconds long — enough to jar us and keep us off balance. Reading real books where the reader sets the pace is no longer fundamental. Children’s movies are even more frenetic, perhaps building the next attention-deficit generation.