My point here is that some new kind of awareness, some new sort of collective consciousness replaced an older one in our brave new post-war world. From Human Clocks to Wikipedia, from the Encyclopedia Britanica to Google and so forth, life changed in dramatic ways that suggest to me that new powers had emerged to alter the course of mankind.
Never before has so great a population had unprecedented access to knowledge in so many arena's with the speed and ease we do now. Its the
increase of knowledge. Who could say anything bad about that?
Well, just like anything else, there is almost a con to be found among the pro's. Our
utter dependency and complete reliance on our technology is the very thing that makes us so vulnerable, either to sabotage or an enormous crash.
We'd be thrust back in to the Dark Ages, except that this time, many more would die because we are not equipped to survive under those kinds of conditions.
That's a lot more Orwellian. Sorry for the tangent, but I think the problems with what you started the topic on run deeper than mere intellectual reliance on the internet, but of our very lives.
“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake