Slashdot has just alerted me to Steven Johnson new book "Everything Bad Is Good For You" on how today's popular culture and new fangled inventions like television, video games and the internet are actually making us smarter. Both the above links have reviews and plenty of the expected reactionary comments.
What we have to remember is that they said the same kind of thing when printing was invented. Then they said that the new printed books were not as good as the old hand-written ones and that printing took away the artistry in book production. Another line of attack was that if everyone could have books to read that there would be nobody out there tilling the fields. It took about 50 years until the older generation had died off and the people who grew up with printed books fully accepted them.
I have been Googling all day to find suitable links for the above paragraph with no success. Maybe I will have get a subscription to Lexis/Nexis.
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