There is a fascinating essay by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books covering three recent books about the impact of the internet on human thought processes. They are World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines and the Internet by Michael Chorost, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser and You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Halpern notes that all these books address an underlying reality, namely our growing dependence on the internet and its growing influence on our thoughts and actions. Referring to Ray Kurzweil's 2005 idea, The Singularity is Near, the moment of internet consciousness, she writes that it seems a silly idea, but it would be even sillier to dismiss it given how much our thinking and behaviour has already changed. Indeed one of the three books reviewed, The Filter Bubble, seemingly documents the way that searches for the same subject by different people produce different results depending on their preconceptions:

'…[B]y having our own ideas bounce back at us, we inadvertently indoctrinate
ourselves with our own ideas. “Democracy requires citizens to see
things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more
enclosed in our own bubbles,” he [Pariser] writes. “Democracy requires a reliance
on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate
universes.”'

This is the central concern of course of Cass Sunstein's earlier book, republic.com.

There are many books at the moment offering assessments of the wider impact of the internet on politics and protest, on society – and now on humanity itself. None of them will be the last word, not least because the effects of the technology are still unfolding. But what does seem undeniable is that the technology – like any general purpose technology – is having profound effects on society, and – unlike previous technologies almost certainly having profound effects on humanity too.