I think this is a really interesting theory by Nicholas Carr.
For ages I've worried that many of my younger friends, in their teens or early twenties, are losing the ability to contemplate, consider, make sensible and informed decisions, have any depth of feeling, emotion or action.
I think it has affected music too.

www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/...aking-us-stupid.html

There's that comment from Pascal that the mark of a mature human being is the ability to sit still in an empty room and think. Hard to imagine these days. For one thing, we don't actually need to remember any more - the actual effort of committing something to one's memory is fast disappearing, because we know we can either record something mechanically or just find it out all over again via the Internet. For another thing, the Internet encourages indiscrimination: it doesn't seem to matter what one finds and where one finds it, so long as one finds something. This is painfully obvious with newspaper and TV 'research' - take the trivial example of obits claiming Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote a song for Steps or S Club 7! The whole chronic distractedness depresses me.

kids in Japan don't know how to write longhand