Yeah, we’ve all heard the latest anti-Internet rants. It’s turning us into a planet of text-based vidiots, incapable of coherent thought or sustained reading.

I happen to have been online since the days of bulletin boards systems and acoustic coupler modems. And I’m plenty capable of internal reasoning. Enough that I fully believe the latest anti-Internet hype, expressed most ludicly by The Shallows author Nicholas Carr, is essentially a load of hooey.

And it’s nothing new. As Vaughan Bell noted last year at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com, ol’ geezers have been whining about those newfangled media menaces at least since Socrates griped about the written word threatening to destroy the great living tradition of oral teaching.

Besides, there’s something about “the shallows” I absolutely adore.

Much of the intellectual world has, for too many decades now, extolled the virtues of Depth but denied the equally important value that is Breadth. The Internet is a breadth-of-knowledge machine like of which the world has never previously known.

And cross-pollenized learning, the great miscegenation of knowledge across nations and disciplines, is part (perhaps the biggest part) of what this species needs to survive.