A propos: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/11/19/18101274/google-alphabet-facebook-twitter-addiction-speed?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

"“The philosophy of the Internet has assumed that friction is always part of the problem,” writes Kosslyn. But look around. The problem now isn’t too much friction; it’s too little. “It’s time,” he says, “to bring friction back.”

Our digital lives dispense with friction. We get the answers we seek instantly, we keep up with friends without speaking to them, we get the news as it happens, we watch loops of videos an algorithm chose for us, we click once and get any product in the world delivered to our doorsteps in less than two days.

Less friction means more time spent, more ads seen, more sales made. Tech companies lose customers during login screens and security verification, and as a result of slow load times. The country’s top computer science talent is paid billions of dollars to further reduce the milliseconds of delay separating our desires and their fulfillment.

But these technological wonders do not seem to have made our lives or societies more wonderful. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, drug overdoses, and suicide are rising. Productivity growth has slowed. Income inequality has skyrocketed. Politics is more bitter and more tribal. Donald Trump is president of the United States. Something is wrong."

Many thanks to all for your thoughts here.
I really must apologize, though, for yet again framing too broad a question; my (main) problem, I think, is that these questions, unwieldy as they are, are my questions; I'm stuck with them, and have thought and written about them for many years now. And this (my first) visit to a thinking-man's forum is rapidly teaching me that the effort required to frame them in a forum-friendly way looks to be self-defeating.
I'm also sorry (in a compounded way) that I seem unable to be of much use to anyone else here--I've been combing the threads, looking for opportunities, but find pretty much what I found at Cambridge (in its different way), with the same 'don't belong here' feeling emerging.
And finally (hey, I'm a Canadian), my apologies in advance for the length, selectiveness, and abysmal quality of my reply here; if I thought my question was too broad, I am completely baffled as to what to do with these responses.
Nonetheless, if only to honor their courtesy, I'll soldier on here for a bit, and then perhaps show myself the exit door.

I am sure that people have said this about television, radio, moving pictures, newsprint, printed books, hand-written books, letters, even writing itself. (Indeed, Socrates allegedly bemoaned writing's detrimental effects on memory.) — sophisticat

No doubt. But (a) the internet (as many, far more expert in its ways than I, have noted) is far more than a mere technical invention (great as some of those were); it represents a whole new and uncharted way of thinking and living; an entirely novel form of global, collective, organic consciousness that clever folk are exploiting for profit, influence, etc. (but I don't care much), and that is intrinsically exacerbating the very ailments we thought it would fix; and (b) the explosive rise of sophisticated technocracy since the mid-20th c has also offered us a host of other staggering leaps in technical capability, which we have, as a species, sensed that we are incapable--morally incapable--of embracing with anything like the necessary assurance of their beneficence--mostly notably stem cell research, and now the rise of AI (which I personally think likely to make even the most sweeping of these discussions quaintly irrelevant within this century). We slow down, consider, perhaps shape, regulate, whatever. We don't just look up at the sky and shrug our shoulders that it's raining.

The internet is just fine. — brianw

See, my problem is I feel I'd need to be a god to say that even half so easily.

It's just that we've never had such a perspective before. There has never been another time in human history (from the records we have) when people from all over the world have been as accessible as they are at present.
It's a new phenomenon and it will take some time for us to refine our interactions. Please bear with it a while longer. — brianw

This again seems to fail to recognize that the net is so different in degree as to be fundamentally different in kind. It's not just a means of communication, another tool like print or even the phone. It's a new, emergent global form of consciousness (and memory and communication, and thus society, and thus morality, etc.). And it's emerging as a form of what anthropologists call radical mutation, a quantum, disjunctive leap from one state of existence to another (in this case in the compass of a single generation), but--and here's the kicker--on a scale far beyond the grasp of traditional categories of human thought and life.
As for bearing with it, I saw what the long distance feeling did, first hand, and for me this is merely a pandemic, effectively asymptotic form of that syndrome.

I don't agree with your concerns re morality. But I'm kind of a freewheeling libertine who isn't very fond of religion, traditional mores, etc — terrapin

Beautiful.

It's certainly not a 'global village' and the cliches are mostly naiive overstatement but that shouldn't overshadow the positive trend. — aporiap

You'll want to pass that on to the International Commission on Stratigraphy as soon as you can. They're clearly making a terrible mistake.

"We solemnly believe that although humans have been around for a million years, you feel strongly that they had just the right amount of technology between 1835 and 1850. Not too little, not too much." — hanover/marchesk

The Amish are such a tough target for mockery. Full marks to the Simpsons for teasing out the absurdity of their existence!
In truth, I feel we've far more to learn from the Amish than from philosophy as currently practiced. But we must learn them philosophically; that's the sad thing.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. — marchesk

The 'long distance feeling' was invented when I was about 15. Obviously a degenerate (as Nietzsche would be kind to say).

If anyone finds the internet tedious, all they have to do is leave it alone. — bcrank

Wow. Another (to me) godlike capability. I'm feeling like a worm in the dust here.

So far, anyway. We don't yet have FaceFuck implants yet, or YouTube hard wired into our eyeballs. — bcrank

So you reject Musk's 'already cyborgs' claim? (I don't.) How about the poor merchants who refused cell-phone suppositories back in the 80's? First you can't make a living without the implant. And then the pleasure begins, conscience-free. (Unless you're Terrapin, whose conscience appears to be permanently liberated.)

No other possible media would have brought total strangers to talk about these issues with the ease it has now.[...] Of course there are the negative aspects mentioned in the OP. Heck, every time I am writing here and discussing philosophical issues with people I have typically no idea who they are, I'm not playing with my children or doing something else. But have we become worse people? I'm not so sure about that. — ssu

Put far too simply (that's my problem here, as I said), the internet does all the right things in all the wrong ways. I would suggest, in response to your very sane observation, that what we cannot speak of together, as real (non-virtual) human beings, existing in the real world, in a single time and place, we should not speak of at all. (For awhile at least; say 1,000 years or so.) It's too much, too soon.
The internet is like a great cultural centrifuge, and we're hurtling outward with it.

Well, for one thing, the design of the Internet needs to be reconsidered. — jake

Your post, Jake, deserves far more, and more detailed attention than mine, I think. And I hope you're finding what your looking for.
The thought of shaping anything so colossally complex, multifarious and liquid as the internet, seems tantamount to shaping global consciousness itself; but if we sat down, like the Amish (https://cspo.org/legacy/library/1104251605F53294166SV_lib_WetmoreAmishTech.pdf.), and asked ourselves what could be a truly good and human internet--for us, you and I and those we care about, now, while we're still recognizably us (thereby defying the centrifuge somewhat, merely in framing the question)--I think it not inconceivable that we might come upon something of use. For example, it might be available only for certain, highly regulated praxes, which we've somehow agreed will only benefit from its inhuman scale and complexity; one might think of medical research (if one wasn't me).
But I can hear the 1st Amendment steamroller in my driveway as I write that, and my little house will be no match for it, I'm sure.
My apologies once again for the poverty of these reflections.

I wouldn't require anyone to go through a counterpoint text

Yea, brother. But this Fux is no ordinary text (for me); not like the (Fux-corrective) Jeppesen text (Counterpoint) that I work with alongside Fux's. It's more like a child's primer, with the most basic semantics and syntax of music in easy, step-wise development. One seems almost lifted up the steps, by some muse or other, instead of having to trudge up them yourself, 'text-wise'.
My experience anyway.

Man, it seems sad to me that apparently a lot of folks around here think there have been no great artworks in their own lifetime. — Terrapin

I wouldn't have said that was so much in evidence, yet at least; we've only heard from very few, after all, and a good number of their proposals were comparatively recent (for such long traditions).
I've been asking this question for many years, and of many different people; and more often find either no thought at all, or a kind of fuzzy thought that there must be something of ours, but then difficulty in advancing or defending, with much passion or conviction, what that something may be.
(Except amongst the aficionados, as in the NYT survey, whose careers, livelihood and self-esteem all rest on its being categorically false. The article, by the way, was explicitly targeted at a 'popular' audience who had no real acquaintance with classical music, as I tried to say; and that's partly why the comments were so bruising.)
At the risk of incurring more hate HATE HATE, I must confess that: (a) it is very much the case for me, for whom unquestionable greatness strangely ended in these traditions around the time I was unfortunate enough to be born, in the critical pivot point of the 60's-70's, (b) more than sad, it amounts to a cultural tragedy that has only gone undiscussed for reasons that usually do not show well on us, and (c) profoundly important as it is in itself, it is in fact only a symptom of much deeper cultural debilitation, whose remedy is practically unthinkable in this distracted time.

Thanks kindly, folks.
I appreciate the thoughtful comments--and the (neither bitter nor cranky) welcome from you, Bitter Crank--but I seem indeed to’ve made (at least) one mistake, in including more than one category--like mixing too many colors of paint. Should've started more focusedly, and with music alone, I think, especially as (for me) it's a touchstone for the rest, in a sense.
So, with many thanks for the generous responses, apologies for soliciting them so muddily, and the suggestion that we not confound snobbishness (which is never good) with distinguishing more and less demanding forms of praxis (which we often can and must do, as a matter of pragmatic course), I propose, members willing, to close this enquiry in favor of a better one in future perhaps.

Thanks, Noah--some serious eclecticism at work there!
I suppose I'd like to specify so-called classical music, since it's that roughly 600-year-old tradition, rather than Queen's roughly 60-year-old tradition, that I'm really curious about.
(But I suppose there are those who refuse to distinguish the two.)

Such an interesting question, Dexter, and such a daunting task in this time.
As an erstwhile teacher, from a family of congenital teachers, I seem to be far less sanguine than most of the respondents here.
For me, it critically depends on your specific context (which I'm far from understanding), but my general sense is that, if whatever values you sought to teach strayed much from the vanilla inclusionism of the present pedagogical climate, you may be in for significant, stressful, and even job-threatening friction.
But on the other hand, hardly any values that (to me) seem truly worth teaching will be acceptable in that climate. (This is a key reason why institutional education is so ineffective in addressing the roots of the problems of our time, I think. But that's another topic.)
A potentially painful dilemma, which I truly hope you won't face.