Again, the theme of people fearing the potential consequences of disruptive media that has become absolutely essential to the flow of modern day life. This quote from Plato demonstrates that even the wisest among us sometimes can't see past their own nose. Yes, Plato correctly predicted that writing and literacy would lead to a decrease in memorization and a de-emphasis on the intellectual oral tradition. But if not for disruptive media, we would all be lounging in the Athenian agora like Plato, believing the sun revolved around the Earth.

Often times, the zenith of disruptive media brings with it exaggerated hysteria over the potential ill-effects of what it will do to our current forms of media. But these doomsday predictions never seem to come to pass. The television didn't kill the radio. Email didn't kill face-to-face human interaction, and neither did the telephone. Writing didn't kill knowledge. Many of these Luddites forget human agency, the ability of humans to balance media consumption and manage the emerging new forms of media with classic forms.

Rheingold begins this section called '(Using) the Internet Makes Us Stupid (or Not)' in order to promote restraint and emphasize the forgotten element in all of these negative predictions for disruptive media: choice.

One of Rheingold’s central rhetorical devices for building ethos in this introductory chapter is to highlight the now-laughable negative reactions to technology that has become irreplaceable to our daily lives. This article from Vaughn Bell in Slate is useful in amplifying Rheingold’s point, that the new digital forms of media are just the latest in a long tradition of disruptive media sources. Bell writes, “Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain.”.In it, he mentions a long litany of naysayers against technologies like the printing press, the radio, and the television. Obviously all of these technologies have fostered human progress more than it has hindered it. I think this is the position Rheingold would take as well, that cries that the Internet is making us dumb or that social media is ruining our politics are huge overreactions to small kinks in a technology that’s benefits vastly outweigh its costs.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - the Atlantic (this is an article that Rheingold references several times) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016? - NPR http://www.npr.org/2016/11/08/500686320/did-social-media-ruin-election-2016

Sounds like a very quick summary of what Ben Thompson was saying two weeks ago. But, in this case, it’s from “the horse’s mouth”.