under the sun. The internet was built by porn, followed closely by gambling. It's not making us stupid, we have been stupid for at least the length of recorded history, and likely long before even that. It does, however, make it much much easier for us to parade our stupidity in front of the community.

Now I gotta go, I hear there's a horse in the 5th at Hollywood that's a sure thing...

I don't know if the question of how the internet is changing us can be answered now. Maybe 100 years in the future. These days if I want to pull a patent, get a recipe or find a vast amount of information about Teilhard de Chardin, I just have to type a few keywords in the computer and the information is instantly there. 15 years ago I would have had to spend hours or wait hours to get the same information. Over the course of decades, how does this instant connectivity change society and the human psyche? I hope I am around to find out. And while it is true that porn and gambling are the biggest hits, I think that just reflects how the internet mirrors our minds. I think Freud would have a field day with it.

Anyone else think this article was a little dramatic/pretentious?

Yeah. On both counts. Except for the "a little" part.

It's wonderful how the imagination of science fiction writers such as Brin has opened up new possibilities for the rest of us.

However, when they offer speculation, disguised as analysis, based on mistaken assumptions which are easily disproven by the either the celebrated new cross-disciplinary specialists or anybody who has experienced or is aware of daily life 40 or more years ago, I get cranky. Yes, Brin discusses others' incredibly annoying and irrelevant viewpoints that are even less grounded in fact than his are but look:

What we need to remember is that there is nothing unique about today's quandary.(emphasis mine) Ever since the arrival of glass lenses and movable type, the amount that each person can see and know has multiplied, with new tools ranging from newspapers and lithographs to steamships and telegraphs, to radio and so on. And every time, conservative nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt, that such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, or perhaps renounced.

If that's the case, then why the drama, nowagainsomemore? I've seen this issue visited and revisited, and much better and more knowledgeably than this article, ten years ago. And the controversy he describes goes back much further, at least to the time the intellectual elite of ancient Greece argued that the play-viewing proletariat would confuse the fiction of the plays with real life.

Other annoying point? Brin's as big (and as impotent) an elitist as the "conservative nostalgists" that history has repeatedly proven wrong. See "infections"; a wish for some magic ritual to destroy "the insipid, vicious and untrue"; and the "unimaginative, fad-following and imitative" who "will matter as little tomorrow as couch potatoes who stay glued to television matter today".

There are exciting and engaging discussions to be had about the internet and its effect on society. This is not one of them.

Does anyone think the internet has increased worker productivity?

I work for, and partly own, a 5-person company that sells scientific equipment all over the world. Our products are sufficiently specialized that we could not support our business on North American sales alone. We simply could not function without the Internet (which includes email as well as the Web, remember). So in our case, not only has the Internet increased our productivity, it actually makes our business possible. Cube farms full of surfing employees are a function of poor company management and leadership, not an inevitable result of the Internet's existence.

That said, I found the article remarkably shallow. And I wish people would stop referring to every supposed cultural change that comes along as an "evolution". There is enough confusion and misunderstanding of the word already, without adding to it by misuse.

My internet is a fashionable SALON of brilliant like minded people. You and yours on the other hand, are feckless scum.

Conservationist - Plato was an enemy of democracy, called for secrecy in government, said that rulers could and should lie like hell and seek no critical feedback and use murder to keep the citizens in check. He performed dizzying acts of "logical" deceit that fall completely apart under critical analysis. He despised science. Plato was generally one of the most malevolent and horrifically wrongheaded curses ever to befall humanity.

But I will say this. Conservationist was among only a few letter writers who bothered to contribute a comment that was even remotely related to the topic of the article. The fluffy nature of so many postings, when the article raised serious questions, ironically added weight to the arguments of the web-pessimists like Carr & Pesce. You never would have seen most of these letters in an older newspaper or magazine, vetted by professional gatekeeper editors.

How will people respond to the paragraph above? With cogent arguments or howls of

"elitism!" Without even weighing how anti-elitist the original article was... alas.

Thanks for trying chikalada.

Thanks riegro -- see two wikis about successful predictions fromEARTH:

http://www.necsi.org/community/wiki/index.php/ICCS06/David_Brin

and http://earthbydavidbrin.pbwiki.com/

Bill becker, sounds like YOU would like Earth.

Yehlaina unwittingly typified the problem. She wrote excellent sentences dissing my article as unoriginal while ironically, making it clear that she was uninterested in grappling with any of the issues raised. Every single complaint she made was about phreases she plucked up, and not one about the fact that she and I cannot argue in this present medium. It is impossible. Watch. Both of us will give up and walk away, each of us smugly sure of ourselves, returning to our online Nuremberg rallies.

alas.

Of course, the comment wave has moved on, so the chance of this interaction leading to any accumulating or iterative wisdom never even arises here. Yes, I am paid to imagine. I imagine a web that offers tools of reciprocal interaction that are vastly more cogent than these we today use. If you are satisfied with what exists, then ponder - perhaps you are the unimaginative and easily satisfied one.