Why Obama is right about the iPad

Critics bashed Obama after he decried devices like the iPad for "distracting" Americans. Obama's "right," argues Newsweek's Daniel Lyons — and that's why we're stuck with Sarah Palin

Best Opinion:  Newsweek

Speaking to graduates of Hampton University last weekend, Obama warned that technologies like the iPad and Xboxes turn information into a "diversion," rather than a means to better ourselves and our society. Tech fans derided him for his "out of touch" statements. Unfortunately, says Daniel Lyons in Newsweek, "he's right." Not only do "our digital tools serve only to enslave us," they turn us into “zombie people.” Here, an excerpt:

"We have more information than ever before. We're never away from it. The air around us fairly hums with it. Computers are all around us too—they're on our desks, in our pockets, on our coffee tables.

"And yet I can't shake the sense that we are all becoming stupider and stupider—and that we are, on average, less well informed today than we were a generation ago....

"Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Glenn Beck has become an influential television commentator, and Sarah Palin is a credible candidate for president in 2012. You think this is a coincidence?

"No way. What's happening is this: we are being so overwhelmed by the noise and junk zooming past us that we're becoming immune to it. We've become a nation of Internet-powered imbeciles, with an ever-lower threshold for inanity."

Read the full article at Newsweek