“We’re turning the world around us into a videogame, using sites like Foursquare to tell our friends where we’re eating lunch, and competing to see who can become “mayor” of some restaurant.

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.

Beck and Palin are the inevitable outcome of that devolution. They are what we deserve. They are, in fact, what we’ve created.”

I’m no fan of Beck or Palin but Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons seems to be falling into an old trap. Whenever we’re confronted with social issues and uncertainty we inevitably start inventing scapegoats to blame.

Today we’re blaming Facebook and FourSquare and FarmVille and iPads for our problems. Back in 1953 the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency blamed comic books. Rock and roll shares this history, with all sorts of nonsense happening in the 50s and 60s (take your pick). People blamed Dungeons & Dragons for Satanism and video games for school shootings. Now we’re blaming websites for distracting America and allowing far-right pundits to gain traction. 

Forgive me if I skip the tech-burning. I still haven’t got the ash out of my hair from when we were throwing Superman on the bonfire. Take your moral panics elsewhere.