Paging Ned Ludd

Sergi Brin concludes his Google  founders letter with the words

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

Think deeply on that last line - "the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life."

There is a lot of rubbish spouted about technology, that Facebook is making us less social, that Twitter is dangerous because its impluse based way of signalling interfers with our empathic brain which takes longer to process signals than social media allows. These are worse than nonsence, reporters picking information from scientific press releases and weaving a pretty tale out of air. Either way these stories are for the most part rubbish.