The internet is, like the printing press and papyrus before it, “a good thing”. Yet, it seems that this quantum leap in our ability to access information comes at a cost that we have yet to value fully. The reasons for this are interesting.

We in the West are only slowly beginning to grasp that our love of rationality and factual knowledge, and the remarkable comforts it seems to have brought, is happening at the expense of other equally vital aspects of our nature such as ethics, memory and common sense.