Courtesy (if that's the word ;> ) of pjack, I have been pointed at this essay on the practical effects of being part of a species that has a limitation on the number of people that one can meaningfully interact with on an ongoing basis:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

Not necessarily original, and certainly somewhat tongue-in-cheek at times (I wonder if Chuck Norris knows that one of Josef Stalin's quotes is being attributed to him?), but an interesting read.

New Scientist:
"Living online: The end of privacy?"

Has links to a few other items (not all necessarily worth the read), including the following SF:

Bruce Sterling, short-short SF story: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google"
(I suspect that Bruce had nothing to do with that title; the story really doesn't have a lot to do with Google.)

Presented as a countervailing vision to the above by someone on /., we have this (rather less short) story by Vernor Vinge: Synthetic Serendipity