It’s an interesting question I think about a lot.  Here’s the trick, which is joked about in this recent funny essay on quitting Facebook: you could be doing a lot of other things than being online.  But are those things necessarily better?  After all, isn’t it good to be social?  Isn’t it good to educate yourself?  And to do what you will with your leisure?

It’s an interesting question.  Of course, by the metric of past social-living and intellectual exchange, the internet loses, but that’s because it doesn’t fit earlier forms.  This is a stupid test, like saying a TV show is a bad book.  Well of course it’s a bad book, idiot.  It’s not a book.  What most people who talk about the internet have to figure out–whether it’s being social or learning or creating art–is the degree to which their commitments can be met in new ways that might accomplish more (or less) than they had with earlier means.  So you’re social in a different way on facebook. But is that better or worse or just different?  And you learn different on google, but (in this article on Seed) that different way of learning might actually be better.  Like anything, I think it all depends on where you’re looking from.  Socrates was right that reading ruined the way people thought, and nobody really thinks like Socrates anymore. And so he would say we think badly.  But I’m not sure that’s true.