Do not imagine that the villagers have stopped talking to each other, glued to their PCs. You should have been at the village meeting last week, convened, of course, via the net. After a lively debate it was agreed by a comfortable majority not to oppose a local farmer's application for a small wind farm on his land. That sort of small-scale electricity production and sale would have been hopelessly uneconomic without the latest IT systems. But the technological scope for it is there.
New technology brings more opportunities than threats.
My son's brains, incidentally, have not been addled by too many computer games. He gave me some useful comments on the first draft of this article.