Thank you Neal DiCampo, Neil Postman and W. S. Merwin.
The Internet is bad. It is bad for many reasons. First of all it is bad because nobody wants to read anymore. It used to be that people would get a book when they wanted to know something, and then they'd read it. But now that they can get the info on the Web, they expect to be able to just get that info and not have to deal with anything else. For example, if you wanted to know how tall the tallest building is, you would punch up "tallest building" on yahoo or something and expect to find a site that had a list of links, like "what it is?" "when was it built?" "how tall is it?" "how many stories is it?" "where is it?" but you might connect to a site that had all that info, but in paragraph form. Nobody wants to read through all that, and they're just going to click "back" and try to find another site that's set up the way they want it. People who write beautiful prose will be long forgotten because nobody cares about that. They just want to click though and get whatever they need.
The Internet is also bad because it has caused an evolution in the kind of content we want. If TV was bad because it is all sex jokes, the Internet is even more juvenile, because it is all fart jokes. I don't mean that it is really all fart jokes, or that TV is all sex jokes, I mean that that is what is called a metonymy, or at least it represents the medium. What I mean is that the clickclickclick mentality, especially with the advent of cable connections is inconsistent with any serious content we'd have to sit through. What's going to happen is the Web is going to get to be just like a brain with all its neural passages and speed, but unlike the brain, nobody's going to want to control the paths they click through with any rational process, and we're going to live in a pseudo-information world that's just like a dream because it isn't organized and its just a stream of images.
The Internet is also bad because there is no control over the content. I don't just mean that there is a lot of bad sex sites (bad referring to the sites, not the sex) and rip-off advertisement meaningless garbage, but previously with books and even TV, there were publishers and advertisers and producers who could say, "Your content is worthy of exposure, but yours isn't." With the Internet, anybody can put out any nonsense. Any shmoe can get on a free or cheaply hosted web site and give his opinion ;) and expect that other people will care, let alone read it. But that's not what will happen. Nobody will hear anybody else's opinion because they're too busy posting their own opinions that no one will read. And with the form of information on the Internet, all of these opinions will be based on a surface examination of the information. No one will any longer be willing to check corroborating sources, or even learn enough information to give an opinion that you couldn't find anywhere, given by any shmoe.
On the other hand, the Internet is also bad because it hypes information so much. Remember in the '80's when we called it the Computer Age? Now we call it the Information Age and say that information will be the new currency. But what is the point of all this information? We used to have information that we actually used, and determined its value pragmatically. Now its just information for its own sake--well, for the sake of entertainment actually. This also determines that fart jokes are as valuable now as weather forecasts were when everybody was a farmer, because information serves a new purpose. Only this time, I'm not sure I like the purpose. Now nobody will care about improving the community, because the community has been replaced by the Web. Nobody wants to work anymore because they expect that they can just do some Internet stuff and make money easy off it. A far cry from the protestant ethic or the farmer's industry (I mean that like the property of being industrious, you language twisters.)
Finally (or not) the Internet is bad because the style of prose is bad. Nobody uses punctuation anymmore (what Neal calls "grammar".) Nobody cares about speling. The effect this has is that we still have writtem texts, but it isn't literature. Now we have a different distinction between literature and writing than the formalists have. Before we discriminated on the basis of artistic value. Now we can complete this discrimination on the basis of where the meaning lies. With literature, the meaning lies everywhere, in the historical, aesthetic, genre or author's context, in the choice of words, in the form and the style of the prose. Now none of that makes a difference. We see only a superficial meaning of "meaning". On second thought, Neal got it entirely backwards. Not only has the Internet not eliminated grammar (although possibly punctuation;) it has eliminated everything except grammar. Grammar is the structure of the language to the extent that it contributes to meaning. When we speak we do not consider any sources or structures of meaning other than grammar because the purpose of speaking is to quickly communicate an idea, not to expose the listener to a wealth of meaning. That is what is happening with the Internet. It was designed to communicate ideas that were appropriate for communication through speaking, but to do so much more conveniently than even the telephone. However, the form of the Internet usually requires that the medium is literary (I mean "with words," not "pertaining to literature") and not linguistic (I mean "spoken," not "pertaining to the study of language"), and so what has happened is that we now use literary media to communicate ideas that we used to communicate orally. These were simpler ideas, used simply for social convenience, not to make art out of ordinary communication forms. Soon we will no longer use even literature to expose an audience to a wealth of meaning. Literature as we no it will be dead :(