Unbelievable, but true. Merriam-Webster's 2007 "word of the year." w00t. If you're wondering, it's an old, tired, overused phrase, a "hacker" term meaning, "yay."

Extremely lame choice.

The correct pick for the word of the year, I think, is actually quite obvious: "Waterboarding."

Or is there a better one?

I was going to write a post about a new study on evolution, when I noticed the author of that study had submitted an entry on Slashdot, and is responding to readers in the comments section. This is another reason why, despite the fact that the scent of trolls sometimes stinks up the place, the Internets are great.

And, as much as Doris Lessing might lament about the "inanities" of the the web -- and yes, I too wonder, for example, where all those people on YouTube have the time to video-record their cats doing silly things -- it has fostered something important. Not perfect, but important.

But what's odd about Lessig's comments is she's obviously missed a large segment of scholarship in the last 40 years:

A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet...

Marshall McLuhan, who back in 1964, wrote "Understanding Media," was one of the first scholars to examine the impact of electronic media on our lives. Jean-Francois Lyotard later famously described the "end of grand narratives" in his book on "postmodernism," a text concerned with the influence technology and computers would have on human knowledge.

More recently, and more specifically about the Internet, there's Lawrence Lessig, Cass Sunstein, Manuel Castells....the list could go on and on. Jean Twenge, a prof. at San Diego State, received a lot of attention earlier this year, with her study focusing on young adults and their use of the Internet, a cohort she calls "Generation Me."

In fact, if you search Amazon for "internet and culture," you'll receive 3,930 books back in the results.

I don't know what Lessig's been reading, but people have been concerned about the impact of computers on our lives ever since there were computers, and maybe never more so than today.