The Online Looking Glass - NYTimes.com

The Online Looking Glass - NYTimes.com: "In every time and place, people have associated new technologies with moral decline. “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce,” Henry David Thoreau griped in 1854, “and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour ... but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.” Similar anxieties have greeted most subsequent inventions, from the automobile to the iPhone: We’re always teetering on the brink of baboondom, always one technological leap away from forfeiting our humanity."