I agree that culture needs to progress, but I also think there’s validity in his point that we’ve never had such a “distracting” technology before to give us as much access to that knowledge you reference. This leads to an uncertainty which Carr used as a hypothesis to explore the topic for his book. We’ve only had this thing in earnest for a couple decades, after all.

As for Orson Wells, a prank is a prank (which I’m sure the guys at zug.com would agree with). Wells used the medium available to him at the time. People are fooling us all the time using the Internet. Just ask that Nigerian prince who has all my money.

another side to the discussion:

our exposure to knowledge is vastly superior to our parents generation. surely this counts for something, if nothing more than knowing what we like and what we don’t like. we’re no longer limited to certain kinds of exposure or influenced as much by one persons opinion or act. do you think orson wells’ reading of war of the worlds would have had ANY impact if he did it today? someone would hear it and tweet it, someone else would pick up on it, five minutes later it’s up on snopes.com and sanity prevails. i’ll take that over reading a book any day.

culture, just as everything else, should progress and change. remaining static does nothing for anyone. embrace your limited attention span… it’s evolution