Personally, I tend to think change is, on balance, good. Something is not better merely because it's different, but something better than what we had before will of course be different, and I have enough faith in our species (and society), to think we pick more positive changes than negative ones. The WSJ has an article on change, and the internet, that I liked: Does the Internet Make You Smarter?
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I'm a reactionary on this, but I have only slowly come to this opinion.
If you could restrict my internet to the equivalent of having Harvard's library on my desktop (including newspapers and a few blogs, mostly written by professionals) plus email, then it would be an unalloyed good.
The other stuff, well, it is for the equivalent of cigarettes or alcohol. At best a fun time-waster, at worst destructive ... with a clear tendency towards the latter. (Of course, the way in which it is destructive is entirely different. Let's just say, less happy in the long run.)
Yet I still use things like Facebook, and Youtube, and other even dumber things.
I suspect that I am common. You can call me weak-willed, but that's the point.
I shop via the internet, which is frequently way more convenient than actually going to a brick and mortar store, or even ordering by phone from a dead-tree catalog (and requires lower labor costs to the seller in addition to my personal labor saved). Pretty sure that's not destructive.
And it's pretty handy as a software library from my viewpoint too.
And I'm not really sure that wasting time bloviating on my blog really is any more destructive than bloviating in a coffee shop or bar or any other place people went to rant to their buddies before the internet.
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