Firstly, all that crap about computers being useless when not on a network is exactly that, crap. It would be like saying "the only point of trains is to travel through town, and that represented how we viewed the use of people, to travel through towns". Technology shapes our view and positions by nature of what it currently allows us to do. Trains connected us with a far larger economy and enabled a more-modern more-consumer culture, which drove the idea of time buying more things, and that time being more valuable, etc. I doubt it had anything to do with how fast trains were. Same goes for the internet. The wealth of information is going to teach us to look at morality, look at our interactions, etc, in a whole new way. It has nothing to do with the tool itself, but the things that tool enables and changes about our interactions.