After reading David Brooks's column today -- one of his periodic forays into amateur pop psychology, this time poking literary fun at all the confusing little gizmos that have irreversibly altered our lives -- I'm tempted to imagine his reaction upon discovering the Internet.

Was it a pleasant experience, inspiring him to write of this bold new frontier, a medium whose limitless possibilities will fundamentally define our character for this next American century? Or perhaps it disturbed him, prompting him to worry that we're in effect uploading our civil society where it can only be viewed through a Web browser, in a form that even Tocqueville, logged in through a prison computer, would never recognize today?

Whatever he thought then, his attention has since moved on to GPS systems and iTunes, and the idea that we're dependent on technology to the point where we rely on it not only to tell us what we want to know, but what we want. Wielding his well-worn rhetorical playbook, Brooks writes: "Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there."

Well, he's there all right, sitting at #1 on the Most E-mailed list, just as he preordained. I'd speculate about whether Brooks is prescient, but unfortunately his predictive powers don't extend much further than the reading habits of New Yorkers.