All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take firm root in our personal experience.

– Goethe

Steve Talbott, who runs NetFuture, said more than a decade ago, ‘The technical opportunity to become friendlier, in other words, is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level.’

Nicholas Carr has done much to popularize the essential question, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ His latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, will be released in summer 2010.

Law professor Cass Sunstein warns against ‘information cocoons’ and ‘echo chambers.’ Law professor Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, argues somewhat the opposite. (Sunstein and Reynolds debated each other in 2007.)

Clay Shirky realized, very early on, that real world power laws applied to the internet. Lately, he’s been claiming the attempt to prevent the diminution of print journalism shouldn’t be about ‘institutional conversion’ but ‘rescuing reporters.’

Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, also likes to think about ‘what life was like before the web.’

Bill Clinton, talking recently about Johnson’s book on ‘the invention of air’, adds this, ‘The point I’m making is, you wouldn’t even think about that if you never read a book; if you had no sense of history; if you were under the illusion that because you were on the internet everything about you was new and everything was special and all that mattered was what you blurted out in the moment that was on your mind.’

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