Maybe the lives of people in the West did get worse due to Internet (debatable), but the lives of everybody else might have gotten better. If not for Internet,

Maybe the lives of people in the West did get worse due to Internet (debatable), but the lives of everybody else might have gotten better. If not for Internet, I'd be a completely different and I suspect much more limited person (I'm from EE). Internet provided me access to role models in my areas of interest who showed me how high the sky can be in our industry (if not for that, I'd be some depressed J2EE developer/Project Manager in a local telco or something). People in the US can just have in-person access to such role models (e.g. by getting a job at some cool company, doing a PhD at strong US technical school etc.), while in backwater areas of the world, if not for Internet, you would not even be aware of this whole cool universe.