What did people do in elevators before Muzak, in cars before AM, at home before radio? People sat around the fire and sang or told stories. Before the transistor, you couldn't even take a radio around with you. I remember when Compaq brought the 'portable' PC - portable if you had a strong back or a dolly and you still needed an outlet It's amazing but predictable that when people were able to bring substantial computer power around with, they would fins uncanny uses for it - scanning bar codes to compare prices, translating menus and signs or even speech. It's not so much that there was a vaccum in people's lives, just new things taking up time that was spent in other ways. 

One can arge that some of those ways were more humane or virtuous - actually talking to each other, but the train's left the station. This 'stuff' is making fundamental changes in the way people live and interact. It's probably making subtle changes in neuro-anatomy, who knows. If there are alternate universes then people in the one where the internet and computers were never invented may probably be surprisingly different in a few hundred years - for better or worse.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken