I have to strongly disagree with you on the smarter part. I recall dialup connecting to old BBS and learning all kinds of things from how to pick locks, how to do basic hacks, SQL injection, legal tax avoidance and many other things.
I used to get most of my dates from Yahoo chat, learned how to trade stocks using Yahoo finance simulator, and learned how to build websites using geocities.
I learned a level of internet safety that modern users have no idea about, I know what is really lurking around in the net, learned to have the thickest "online skin" because I've been called it all a billion times before.
I'm not saying there wasn't useful information on the internet that you could learn from. There is now but the internet is making people dumber anyway. You could have learned lock picking, hacking and other things without the internet - there are books on these subjects. You may say you wouldn't have because you would never have become interested in those things in the first place. But then you would have pursued other things with your time, made better real life relationships and learned other things, perhaps things that would have been more useful in an internet-free world than the things you learnt are in the world of the internet. Of course you might also have wasted your time on TV and movies, but that's just showing those were a bad idea as well as the internet.
Ok I get what you are saying, that smartness exists (or doesn't) before logging on, and that is the determining factor of what one would do with their time, whether to learn or vegetate - and this applies to both online and offline.
I have to strongly disagree with you on the smarter part. I recall dialup connecting to old BBS and learning all kinds of things from how to pick locks, how to do basic hacks, SQL injection, legal tax avoidance and many other things.
I used to get most of my dates from Yahoo chat, learned how to trade stocks using Yahoo finance simulator, and learned how to build websites using geocities.
I learned a level of internet safety that modern users have no idea about, I know what is really lurking around in the net, learned to have the thickest "online skin" because I've been called it all a billion times before.
I could honestly go on and on.
I'm not saying there wasn't useful information on the internet that you could learn from. There is now but the internet is making people dumber anyway. You could have learned lock picking, hacking and other things without the internet - there are books on these subjects. You may say you wouldn't have because you would never have become interested in those things in the first place. But then you would have pursued other things with your time, made better real life relationships and learned other things, perhaps things that would have been more useful in an internet-free world than the things you learnt are in the world of the internet. Of course you might also have wasted your time on TV and movies, but that's just showing those were a bad idea as well as the internet.
Ok I get what you are saying, that smartness exists (or doesn't) before logging on, and that is the determining factor of what one would do with their time, whether to learn or vegetate - and this applies to both online and offline.