Apropos of the recent article on how “Googling for stuff makes you feel smarter”, here is Umberto Eco on something similar:

A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.

(sound familiar?)