Damon Darlin has interesting thoughts in NYT on Nicholas Carr’s article on how Google is dumbing us down. As correctly pointed
It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Lots of people by nature are averse to any new ideas or new devices. For them new means demise of the familiar and productive current tools. As it turns out, tecnology also goes through a Darwinian evolution like evolution approach. Only the right ones survive but the demise also is not instantaneous — society gives time to every idea and technology and then only the winner emerges.
Of course, one has to keep some other factors in mind:
In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.