My first reaction to this was: How does Everquest have anything to do with objectivity or anything serious?
Then I started watching the video.
It's very interesting. Have a look at this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-...el_video_title
There're goods and bads with every change. There're things that will die and resurface. There're things that will die and stay dead. Therer're things that die, stay that way, yet are remembered. There're things that survive. But most importantly, it's a mixture just like a chemistry experiment. It's hard to isolate things. So it's like things live or die as a subset of something else. When you look at evolution, certain species died off, but if you look at their DNA you see that broad parts of it still remain one way or another in other species. If we don't understand this then we would discard the dna which houses even greater distinction and shows us that changes are hard to isolate from other things. I guess what I'm saying here is that it's hard to direct evolution, but it's easy by comparison to understand it after it has already happened. The tricky part, I think, is in not KNOWING too well what's good and bad. Evolution is more complex than that.
So anyway, I liked how this video called these generations digital immigrants. That's really what's going on here. It's not the end of productivity or the end of civilization as we know it. It's the changing of things, not the end. How this change happens could be smooth or not smooth. I can't say for sure whether everything about the information age is good because I don't think everything is. But whether we can stop this from happening or not or whether we should try to is something I would rather not touch because I feel it's outside of my sphere of influence. If I was god or somebody who had a clearer grasp on it, I think I might be more assertive about throwing away the computer or shutting off the internet, but I think from my standpoint that the internet offers us good things just about as much as it has given us bad things. But I think history is similar. It's good and bad too. My mind is too small to take sides.
I think that, broadly, we've all jumped into the deep end as digital immigrants. Some of us will survive and some of us won't. But what happens to the digital age itself will be reflected by the sum total of everything, not by a single persons success or failure in their attempts to adapt. We can take specific examples of failure and then claim that this evolution in broader terms has failed. But as I said a few paragraphs above, failure often has within something of even greater distinction and when you can see that you will find that the reasons for things are hard to separate from each other and time, by far, is a much more effective test.
In any case, as we immigrate to the digital world we will take our wars with us.
PS: That Doonesbury comic was too true.