The term ‘diaspora’ may be unfamiliar these days. It’s from a Greek word that means ‘to scatter’ and ‘to sow.’ It’s often applied to the Jewish people’s forced exile from their homeland by the Babylonians (and then the Maccabees and then the Romans) and their struggle to maintain their tradition and culture while separated from Israel.

That’s roughly, if not at all exactly, what’s happening now to everyone who looks at a computer screen. We are being whisked away from ourselves into a vast world of information.

Some of what we encounter is as or more important than what we used to find in our pre-internet world. Some of it, like Google Book scans, is identical, if not more accessible, than what we had before. But there is also trash, lots of it, and we are a 100,000-year-old species. Just like our bodies were not designed to say no to sugar, which was once rare, our minds may not be designed to say no to frivolousness or to even be able to identify it.

If Goethe is right, ‘We read far too many poor things, thus losing time, and gaining nothing,’ then our access to endless information, however democratizing and convenient, is not without an inevitable curse.

Technological evangelists say the internet has the potential to change for the better the human condition.

On the other end, critics say the internet is already leading people to become ever more shallow, distracted, baffled, self-absorbed, and asocial.

The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. As Steve Talbott said, ‘The technical opportunity to become friendlier, in other words, is also an opportunity to become unfriendly at a more decisive level.’

We are either poised to be able to improve ourselves or to become a species ever more brutish and nasty. Surely, if we are able to go one way and not the other, we should do everything possible to encourage the former and prevent the later.

But, first, we must understand what is happening.

(Illustration by Stanley William Hayter.)