Intriguing article in the Wall Street Journal about the impact of the Internet on knowledge and thinking.  Is the internet the end-of-the-road for intellectual thought/progress?  Is the web too dominated by celebrity gossip posts, trending memes, and nonsensical YouTube videos?  Clary Shirky, writer for the Wall Street Journal, begs to differ!

“First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching “Diff’rent Strokes” than reading Proust, prior to the Internet’s spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.”

Here is the link to the article.