
As more and more people sign up for Facebook accounts and as texting overtakes phone calls we have been subject to an avalanche of books, articles and blogs such as How the Internet is making us stupid by Nicholas Carr, or 13 ways the Internet is making us smarter, by David Weinberger or even how social media influences revolutions in my own blog Revolution 2.0 and Social Media. We are even seeing infographics like Is social media making us socially awkward? by Schools.com. The interesting thing is that these debates are not new nor have they been limited to discussions of the pros and cons of the internet. There have always been those who saw great promise in new technologies while others saw the end of our way of life. Usually both have been wrong. Consider that Philo T. Farnsworth, television’s inventor, thought television would end war or that in 1939 a critic in The New York Times dismissed television on the grounds that “the average American family hasn’t time for it.”