The Internet is the aggregate of human derpitude.Listening to the Internet without being confident you've found a well-curated garden relative to the area of concern is a bad idea.

The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.

When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

The one plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled - by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games or electronically inform friends that, like, 'rain sucks!' But there's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof . . . that literature—that narrative art in whatever form—will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories—human stories, stories that speak to us—in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that.