Is the world better off because of the Internet?

Well, Italian ladies are just great, I'll grant you that. 

Yes, just because you can google it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to learn it.  But I remember a survey conducted about 15 years ago where many Indians could not recall the name of the President.  This would not be unusual (since the Indian President is merely a ceremonial head of state) but in the case, the President was high profile, having formerly been involved with India's atomic programme and frequently made public appearances.  And yet, people drew a blank.  So it is not new for a lot of people to be clueless about things which we may believe are important to know.  The fact is that they are not important to know 99% of the time.  It is during that 1% of the time when you really need to remember and for whatever reason cannot access the net that having reasonable awareness helps.  Again, the latter is more of a third world problem.  I suppose it must be very rare to lose internet connectivity anywhere anytime in a country like Canada. It is like how our grocers can remember how much veggies they sold to who (and Indian customers can come up with myriad combinations of a quarter to more than two kilos of a given vegetable and buy half a dozen or more varieties of vegetables in one outing) and calculate the price accurately...without a calculator.  You don't necessarily NEED that ability if you are equipped, but the ability to do so keeps your mental reflexes fast and that is what we are losing out in general with increasing technological aid.

The simplest way I can think of is to quote Shakespeare when he says "Clothes make the man", which of course they don't but being Shakespeare he doesn't mean it literally (in fact in context he was being somewhat sarcastic because the punchline to that was "...which is doubly true in France" but hey-ho).

Now, it can be argued that changing our clothes changes who we are but sadly (as someone unkindly pointed out) I look like a tramp even when wearing a £1000 suit and behave the same regardless of what I am wearing. Frequently my wife has berated me for wearing my best clothes when decorating or answering the door in my dressing gown ... ("I didn't know I had a door in my dressing gown"). Truth is we select our clothes to suit who we are so what we wear defines who we are and when Shakespeare says clothes make the man he means we are judged by the clothes we wear.

Now I wasn't being quite that poetic nor was I using "make" in quite that way, but I wasn't being literal either. The Internet doesn't literally make us parochial and insular but that does not mean we cannot become parochial and insular as a result of what we read on the Internet. 

No passive medium can make (as in force) us to react in a certain way but it can make (as in cause) us react in a certain way. If we presume that the Internet contains the sum total of man's knowledge then what we draw from it can be used to "make" us anything we want to be, yet it doesn't. The point (in context) I was making was the Internet has the potential of bringing us together as a global nation yet what we (deliberately) take from it has the opposite effect.