A decade or so ago I had thoughts along the lines of, "What if we completed the construction of what is already the largest apparatus in the history of industry, the communications structure, and all the equipment was at last ready to function as one finely-tuned instrument; and it turned out that no one had anything to say?" My answer then was that probably humans will not, at last, have anything to contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge, at a minimum; but that topic has already been recently run into the ground on HZ. The more immediate situation is considered in an "Atlantic" article:

What the Internet is doing to our brains

Notable quote in the article by playwright Richard Foreman:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

Further commentary on the article:

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat. — W. Daniel Hillis