Check out the radio show "Revenge of the Nerds" from To The Best Of Our Knowledge here:
http://www.wpr.org/book/080525b.html

It contains some interesting interviews with various authors of nerd/geek-related works and sheds some insight on our general cultural reaction to nerd/geek-ness.

I submitted this to Slashdot as an article (acceptance is pending):
http://slashdot.org/submission/1005483/To-The-Best-of-Our-Knowledge-About-Nerds

Today's NYTimes Science section had an interesting piece about human behavior:

Stumbling Blocks on the Path of Righteousness:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/health/05mind.html

It may be of interest to think about my TeamHuman.org project from this perspective. I like to think of TeamHuman.org as assisting all of us affirm and stay true to the values that benefit us all. And this website is intended to serve as a social network-powered "morality crutch."

A fascinating acount of a famous western traveler's visit to Iran:

http://www.ricksteves.com/iran/

My favorite part in his Commonwealth Club presentation: "Death to traffic!"

I just created a wiki article with some links about Andrew Keen's opinions:

http://hub.teamhuman.org/tribes/tribe/internet/wiki/AndrewKeen

My take is that the internet is not necessarily a threat to human culture. It all depends on how we use it. So really he is cautioning about what he sees as bad usage patterns, not that the web is somehow intrinsically evil.

Hammers are quite useful, but we don't all go around with hammers all day trying to 'fix' various things we find. And knives are great too, but we try not to let the kids play with them. The internet is just another tool we've created, which will have good and bad uses ranging from awesomely useful to inappropriate to harmful.

We're still in the early days of figuring out the best ways to use the web. So we're in an important exploratory phase where we will learn the best way to put it to use, which may require eventual re-architecting and regulation. But in the mean time, we should keep playing, keep discussing, and take good notes.

(Technical aside: Testing whether wikiwords work here, if so, this will link to the aforementioned wiki particle: AndrewKeen ).