The article claims  that the increased use of the internet in place of reading print is changing the way we think. We used to have to think deep and take our time to understand the text that we read, but now we can access all the information we want and we don't really have to think or process the information. The internet has all the information we want but it also comes with distractions that keep you from focusing on the text for too long or focusing on the text too deeply. As the internet becomes more intelligent and more human, we become more machinelike with less thought processing.
The internet has made it easier for us to find information and thus it makes us not work as hard for the information we want. The internet distracts us from our deep thought and reflection so much that we tend not to do it anymore. Study's haven't shown how, but the internet is changing the way we think and rewiring our neural pathways.
 Literacy in this article is defined pretty much the same, except instead of speech being in danger, its print. Literacy is the deep thought and reflection of processing either text or thoughts themselves to gain deeper insight into them. In this article alone literacy is defined as being able to think about and analyze print over a generous amount of time as opposed to skimming and article over a few minutes.
The internet has changed the thought and reading processes of many people in that people are now more efficient. People take less time to think about an article or even read it for that matter, they just skim over the text for a few minutes and then skip on to something else interesting they saw on the web. The internet is broadening what people read rather than making people think deeper into what they read. The author uses older changes in technology to demonstrate what people thought about changes similar to this and how they actually turned out such as the transition to mechanical clocks. He also brings up how changes in medium change the way we write and read just like how Nietzsche changed what he wrote when he changed how he wrote. And finally he brought up HAL and how it was more emotional, more human, than the actual humans because the actual humans lost the reasoning skills of deep thought. This evidence was very effective for the singular reason that it showed relevance throughout different situations and examples. It was different but it all helped prove a different part of the same point. The article's answer to the "so what" question is that as we rely more on the internet we lose the ability to think deeply into text and thought. This topic matters because it is a phenomenon that is happening right now, the reader should take away that they should take more time reading and not get distracted.