they say this generation is the most entertained generation..but a less happy one. the old, much discussed question on whether or not modern information technology would make us better persons in the final analysis has never been easy to answer. personally i don't wanna live a life without the internet, but I also staunchly subscribe to the creed "knowledge for knowledge's sake." with the advent of websites such Wolfram Alpha (type in your math problem and you'll get an answer in one click) and the ever-increasing information glut consuming today's world, one can't help but foresee a world dominated by people who have all the answers, but understand none of them.

Here's an article by Jessica Zafra that perfectly articulated my above musings:

Goodbye, Eureka EMOTIONAL WEATHER REPORT By Jessica Zafra Updated July 12, 2009 12:00 AM



Of course age is a factor. If I were in school right now, I would think that Wolfram Alpha is the greatest thing ever, the savior that would liberate me from the torments of math. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that solves calculus, physics, geometry, chemistry problems. You type in the problem, press enter, and voila.
But I left school decades ago, when students did their math homework themselves, from scratch. Calculators were allowed only if the numbers were too big or too small, if there were numbers at all. To put it plainly, I feel cheated.
Understandably, teachers are up in arms. How are they to determine whether a student understands the lesson or simply consulted a search engine? I considered not mentioning Wolfram Alpha at all, but can we assume that students aren’t using it already? If there’s been a sudden, marked improvement in the quality of homework it is worth looking into.
What are teachers to do in the information age, when nearly all answers are available in seconds? They’ll just have to ask trickier questions and have students do the equations right in front of them.
My math grades were mediocre at best, so I asked Kermit to test the search engine with some calculus problems. He tossed it some differential equations, higher math and chemistry problems, and reported that it had performed beautifully.
“How will students learn if they can just go to Wolfram Alpha?” I asked. Kermit noted that our parents had said the same thing of the calculator, which has helped rather than impeded learning by cutting out the tedious stuff. He added that the slide rule used to be compulsory for engineers, but how many engineers today can work a slide rule? It’s progress, he declared.
I countered with Richard Feynman’s dictum that in order to truly understand an equation you must derive it yourself. In circumstances like these it’s best to bring in the biggest brains. Still, it is disturbing to me personally to be perceived as defending “tradition” and “the old school.” I remembered an Internet essay by a university lecturer who wanted to know why her son had to learn how to write the alphabet when there is little likelihood of him needing penmanship in a world full of keyboards. What an idiot, I thought, but fewer people seem to think so.
In the end I took refuge in snobbery. “Well we can’t expect practitioners of the aPPlied sciences (Note the exploding “P”) to appreciate knowledge for its own sake,” I thought. Such scorn masks our envy of those who make the big bucks.
Basically it hurts to be called old-fashioned.
My unease only grew in the days that followed. We confuse information with knowledge. Knowledge in-depth — knowing a subject forwards, backwards, sideways, and inside-out — is viewed as quaint and unnecessary. At the same time we have become too dependent on machines. Over-reliance on technology is never a good thing. Are we humans, the top of the food chain, or just accessories of machines? The American financial industry left the computation of derivatives to machines, and look what happened.
Maybe I’m uneasy because having read so much science-fiction from the Cold War era, I am primed to expect a technological apocalypse. As a tech columnist my grasp of the circuitry may be tenuous, but you can count on me to ask the vital question: Is that thing going to attain consciousness and take over the world?
“You know what’s happening?” I told Bert. “We’re heading for a future in which quick answers are so easily obtained, in-depth knowledge will be a luxury. Most people will never know the sheer pleasure of knowing, they’ll just go to a search engine. We’re the last of the amateurs, the nerdcore who learn something for the love of it.”
All those hours of meditation to keep his mind off his mind seem to have kicked in, because Bert summed up my despair in one line. “There’s no more Eureka moment.”
Eureka!
According to science lore, the Greek mathematician Archimedes was getting into his bath when he realized that he could measure the specific gravity of an object by submerging it in water and weighing the displaced water. He was so excited at this discovery that he leapt out of the bath and ran naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka!”
To some degree, this is what happens when you’ve been working on a difficult problem and you’re about to start weeping in frustration, when suddenly you see the solution and it’s so simple you wonder why it took you so long to get there. In those seconds you feel like you understand Everything. Eureka! The joy and wonder of discovery, nudity optional.
“Think of those temples with monuments to the ancients,” Bert went on placidly. “Someday there will be monuments to the specialists who rejected the shortcuts. The people who could solve equations with just pencil and paper. The people who know the relationship between aperture and shutter speed.”
Later I was reading a book of essays by an art critic when a sentence jumped up and smacked me in the eye. “To live intensely is a basic human necessity.”
To work problems out for yourself, to find your own way out of ignorance, to know the pleasure of knowing — these things improve your quality of life. Unfashionable, even impractical, but true.