The Coming Dark Ages?

After reading Distracted, I became curious as to whether or not our society is heading to a new dark ages. The author of distracted explains that since we are losing our capacity to maintain attention, civilization itself is coming to an end.
The concept of a postmodern dark age is not a new one. At each major step of technological and cultural change, there has always seemed the possibility of civilization's collapse. The perceived excesses of the youth culture of the 60s were once seen as the end of western civilization. This has manifested itself in our cultural imagination. One of the more obvious examples is the zombie film. Zombie movies chart the fear we have of losing our common humanity. A fear completely understandable in the light of the major atrocities of the twentieth century. This fear is inextricably linked to our discourse on technology. It's not a coincidence that the Zombies in Night of the Living Dead were created by radiation from a newly sent satellite to Venus.
The fear is also cosmic in a way. We are afraid that mankind has (to quote the pilot from Day of the Dead) "overstepped its britches". Of course the most obvious literary example of this would be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This fear underlies distracted. The second chapter ended with an almost poetic discussion of how the internet is severing us from our ties to location, to each other, and to the Earth as a whole. Implicit in this is the moral judgement that mankind must be bound by the laws of time and space, and any attempt to transcend them will end in Promethean tragedy.
The scary thing is, that this might all be true. There is more and more evidence that our technologically advanced lifestyles are changing the makeup of our brains. Maybe we slowly are becoming zombified?
But then, maybe the ability of humanity to transcend space and time isn't a bad thing. In many ways, this has been the goal of human art, religion, and science for millenia. Our technology might be simply the ability to realize these dreams. Even if this technology changes what it means to be human (something, I think, that has already happened) that change isn't necessarily negative. It might just be the growing pains of homo sapiens 2.0.

by the way, I should mention that historians are discovering all the ways in which people in the so-called Dark Ages were actually smarter than we are.