I think the price we pay for having easy access to so much information, easy quick access to so much information is we sacrifice some of the depth of our engagement with that information. So the kind of jumping, hopping from bit to bit, clicking on links takes the place of what used to be a more contemplative, I think, approach to thinking about one thing, whether it's one piece of information or the argument or the narrative of a book. It becomes much harder, I think, when you're bombarded by information and other stimuli, as you are all the time on the web, to sit down and really focus on one particular thing. I think the great value of thinking deeply and reading deeply and concentrating in general is that we begin to develop a unique personality, a unique intellect that's ours and ours alone. And that requires, I think, deep thought and the ability to make our own associations and our own connections about things we understand deeply inside our own mind, rather than relying on the associations and connections that might be out in the world and that we might access through hyperlinks, for instance. So I really think that the human self and the human personality becomes much richer when we can slow down and when we can think deeply and engage with information in more than just kind of a cursory manner. And really, the effects of the internet, I think, are the same on adults as on younger kids and younger adults. And if you look at the statistics, it's people in their later 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, who are online much more of the time than, say, teenagers. So I would hate to have the focus on generation web, you know, make it seem as though older people aren't affected by the internet because I think they are. And I think what we see in young people, the distractedness, the inability to, you know, read more than two pages at a time, is probably coming to characterize older people in every generation as well. Having said that, you know, I think obviously, the brain is, the human brain is malleable throughout the course of anybody's life, but it's particularly malleable, of course, when you're young. So if a person is brought up looking at screens and using the web and being bombarded by information, then the question is, will the brain circuitry necessary to do things like deep reading, deep thinking, will those circuits ever even come into being? Will they be wired for that kind of thinking? Or will they be wired completely for internet type of thinking for taking in lots of information very, very quickly? And I think that's the big fear is that we'll end up with a generation of people who are very good at using the net and very good at finding information and processing information very quickly, but don't really have any capacity for contemplativeness or for concentration or for deep engagement with information. There are now people in the midter getting on to advanced teens who have never known, obviously, a world without the word, in fact there may be 20, 20 years, 20-year-olds who've never known anything about that. Have they developed strange thumbs? Do they have peculiar ways of talking and listening to their eyes glaze over when they have to concentrate for more than 30 seconds? No, I don't believe any of that. I'm not particularly negative or pessimistic about the social qualities, the linguistic qualities, the concentration qualities of generation web as they're called. I honestly believe that if you were to go back into the 1920s and take an ordinary semi-educated 15-year-old and place him next to an ordinary semi-educated 15-year-old now, you would find the one now knows more, understands more, is more socially confident, is more aware of the rest of the world, is more able and more adept at research, may not be able to say the nine times table as fluently or repeat a marma-sama, marma-sama, it's a man. They may not be able to do that. Is that such a great loss to an old fashion person like me? I'd love to think people could do both, but let's get real about this. Connection is what humans crave. It's what we are all about. It's something that separates us from animals. It's even comes before the fact that we have language, because the language is an example of a, if you're like a neural technology, we have created to answer this need for connection. We are the social animal par excellence, or by devil, if you like, if not necessarily excellence. We are constantly in need of connecting with people for friendship, love, sex, knowledge, growth, enmity, territoriality, all the imperatives that drive us as human beings. We've created villages and towns to help us do that and roads, and now we've created something else that allows us to do it even more. Human social history has been filled with inventions and developments and techniques that have threatened the way we arranged ourselves. A very good example that seems so peculiar is that Anthony Trollop, the English novelist best known for writing books on politics and the church, was also a civil servant of some importance, and he invented the post-box, the pillow box, and he was distraught that his invention might undermine the Victorian family. Now at first, it seems like, why would it do that? Well, until the time the pillow box arrived, the post-box, the little red thing we put a lettering, a woman had never been able to write a letter and get it delivered without giving it either to a postman or to her father to be sent. The middle-class woman had no ability to connect with a man except through the graces of her parents, particularly her father. And Trollop, who was, although he was a fine novelist and an innovative thinker, was very traditionalist and he hated the idea that there were women communicating with men without their father-know-own about it because they could just slip a letter into a post-box. And similarly, if you go back a little further to the time of Jane Austen, people found the idea of the novel simply horrific. People could not bear the idea of children sitting around reading. They should be, if they were going to read, it should be sermons and history, but certainly not novels. And they should be going about a place sitting up straight at dinner parties and walking and being healthy. And then of course, so long came radio and people could bear the idea of people sitting around the radio and then television and then games and then computers and then all these things seemed to those who were not brought up in them, somehow to diminish because we're also proud of our youth. We think our youth and our childhood was somehow, if not perfect, even if it was imperfectly made as suffer, how dare these children now not suffer the way I did. They should be having the kind of life I did, made to read, made to do this. They should not have this freedom, this access. Or if they do, while I can approve of it, I ought to suggest that it's dangerous that it's going to go wrong. Well, yeah, I mean, some genius when they let out of a bottle can cause problems and they certainly can't ever go back in the bottle. When cars first arose, people were horrified at the deaths on the road. Horrified. They couldn't believe it. I mean, there were hundreds of people being squelched every day. It was grotesque. And you know, if you just break in a car at 30 miles an hour, you'd kill yourself on the steering wheel, you'd break a neck. People were dying all the time. Did they say, oh, that's it then. I hope we can't have cars. Sorry. In the same way as if someone says, actually, these mobile phones do give out microwaves and they will give you brain cancer. And we can say, oh, well, that's end of that technology. They're not talking to you. Nelly, there's a risk reward ratio here. And for us, the reward is so great that whatever the risk is, we try and contain it and understand it at best. But what we don't do is say the risk is too great.