World Wide Web has been around for ~14 years. During this time, it has absorbed the attention, thought and energy of millions of humans, a disproportionate number of them our youngest and brightest.
Here is the question: has there been a benefit? A clear, incontrovertible improvement in humanity's creative capacity, innovation, or discovery?
Or has it been, (to steal and misuse a lovely term from Dave Sims) an Exodus Inwards, leaving the real world impoverished for the experience?
If such close contact with Virtu has been a benefit, the benefit should be obvious in Veritie.
(Terms Virtu and Veritie being coined by Roger Zelazny, referring to Cyberspace and the Real World, respectively.)
The reason why I ask is that the results seem to be inconclusive. For every advance, there seems to be a retreat.
Television was argued to be a benefit; after long years it becomes apparant as merely a narcotic, a time waster, a destroyer of imagination.
...The World Wide Web : The New Television.
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