We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.

New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, 'Jane is now friends with Tom.' The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.

For Google, the problem with being a free, abundant, and rather infinite set of services is that it's hard to create much of a stir about anything. There are so many major software service options under the 'more' menu on the Gmail page that they've had to go and add a final item called 'even more.'

Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures - from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete.

Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.