Totalitarian rulers aren't the only people who get nervous around new information technologies. In his 1986 book The Cult of Information, cultural critic Theodore Roszak fretted that the flood of electronic data would drown genuine thought and ideas. "It would be a great loss if, by cheapening our conception of experience, memory, and insight, the cult of information blunted [human beings'] creative powers," Roszak wrote.

Albert Borgmann, a philosopher at the University of Montana, is the latest to sound the so-called humanist alarm against the encroachments of the information revolution. In Holding On to Reality, he divides information into three classes-natural, cultural and technological -and argues that only the first two are
"spare and austere enough to engage memory and imagination."Technological information, from this point of view, is a usurper that substitutes transistors, Boolean logic and pixels for direct experience and learning.