The internet's potential

This blog post, "Beware The Internet As Liberation Theology," from Forbes.com pushes back against some recent claims that Peter Singer  has made about the potential of the internet.  But really, it pushes back against anyone who still thinks that's it's just a matter of time until the internet opens our door (soon!) to the new Golden Age that's impatiently waiting for us on our doormat.  From the post:

What does it mean to say that everyone now has access to the world’s greatest libraries when studies show that many Millennials – the generation born and raised after the arrival of the Internet – can barely use Google to search the web? What does it mean to say that the power of corporate media has been broken by independent bloggers when, increasingly, those corporations are crowd sourcing content from bloggers for little or  (as is mostly the case) nothing?

There are times when I think about the fact that out of, say, 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 years of human existence, I'm living in an era that's defined by technologies that have only existed during my lifetime. So what's with the cat pictures and the Youtube fights?