A letter comes in the mail. The happy man glances at it; it is addressed to him. He opens it and reads it. Immediately his expression changes, he turns pale and collapses in dispair. When he comes to himself, he weeps, trembles, and moans; he tears his hair, and his cries fill the room. You would say he was in convulsions. Fool, what harm has this bit of paper done you? What limb has it torn away? What crime has it made you commit? What has it changed in you to put you in the state that I now see you in?

On November 20, 2008, Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University won the U.S. Professor of the Year award. Wesch made a name for himself studying the social implications of YouTube. His “anthropological introduction to Youtube,” posted on the site itself, now has well over a million views. In it he discusses how YouTube, along with other forms of communication on the Internet, have transformed society by creating new forms of community. When I watched the video several weeks ago, I admit to being moved by Wesch’s celebration of how the Internet has brought humans closer together and created new forms of identity as we move into the 21st century.

By now we’re pretty used to hearing about how the Internet has transformed our lives and how our generation is not only used to it, but also dependent on it. But amidst the emphatic discussion among those who praise the convenience, economic opportunity and even freedom that computers have given us, we often forget how much skepticism and even antipathy the very same people have towards the “new forms of community” that Wesch describes.

While we praise Facebook for its ability to keep us in touch with people we might otherwise loose contact with, we retain an appropriate cynicism over such relationships, which are trivialized to the occasional sentence-length update on our news feed. Online degrees are generally held in contempt by both students and faculty at “real” colleges and universities. Admittedly, it’s easy to see how the above examples require a “human face” that electronic exchanges can’t provide. But even Wikipedia, which provides us not with interactions, but with relatively objective information (and whose accuracy is comparable to the encyclopedia Britannica) is frequently degraded as a cheap source of reference.

The contempt that we constantly express towards these online interactions and others is enough to convince me that the Internet is not an entirely positive addition to human society. I often wonder where this distrust comes from. For those of us who remember the early- and mid-1990s, perhaps some of it is simply a natural conservative impulse. During our formative years, making plans required picking up a phone to call a friend. Accessing information necessitated sifting through an encyclopedia or yellow pages. Like any form of massive social change — from the spread of Christianity in the ancient world to electing the first black president of the U.S.– it would make sense of the rise of the Internet to elicit a heavy conservative backlash. If this is the cause of our distrust of the Internet, will future generations, born after the late ‘90s, accept the Internet more than us?

I think that there is a more fundamental reason for our distrust — something that will always prevent humans from being able to separate the exchange of even the most impersonal information from the social context that surrounds it. It is an attitude that is perhaps most eloquently summed up in the quote that begins this essay. In Book II of Emile, or On Education, (published in 1762) Jean-Jacques Rousseau expresses his contempt for the ways in which the abstract epistolary transfer of information can affect something as real as human emotion and even physical condition. He uses this as one of many examples of how advanced society can be artificial and have the power to corrupt morality. Fortunately for his sake, Rousseau did not live to anticipate a time in which one out of every six marriages take place between individuals who met online.

Rousseau’s commentary, though perhaps a bit extreme, reveals a basic fact about humans. We are ultimately incapable of reducing our interactions and our search for knowledge to the mere exchange of information that occurs between machines. The ways in which we receive information will always be as important as the information itself. No matter how much we try to divorce our emotions or our humanity from our search for facts and knowledge, we can never be entirely impersonal or objective. Some would view our inability to extract exchange of information from social context to be something that will hold us back in our efforts to become more technologically advanced. But I think that those same people would also believe that such inability is an essential part of what makes us human.