On Intellectual Topics

The time has come. I am enjoying a peaceful Sunday afternoon, and I have decided to treat the world (or the 3.2 people that visit my blog on a regular basis) to a delightful post about my view of technology and its effects on the world, and how the average population's intelligence has changed in the past one hundred years.
First of all, technology is amazing. I can play virtual tennis, check e-mail, and read the day's news all on my Nintendo Wii. I can update my blog site and chat with 16 different friends from school at the same time while I'm surfing the web. I can buy a guitar off the Internet and have it delivered to my doorstep tomorrow. Truly, people are much smarter than they were 100 years ago. Or are they?
I've heard that some of our founding fathers could write two letters to two different people in two different languages with their own two hands at the same time. I haven't seen anyone doing that on Youtube lately. To tell you the truth, I haven't seen anyone run our nation, or any nation for that matter, the way the founding fathers did. We're making giant leaps in technology, but are they as significant as the inventions of 100 years ago?
Think about some of the leading inventions over the past 100 years or so...the atomic bomb, the automobile, the airplane, calculators (which led to computers). What have we had in the past 20 years? E-mail (E-mail has only gone mainstream in the last 20 years, though it was probably around before then), iPods, compact discs (again, they've gained popularity in the last 20 years). In recent years, we've only been able to improve on what we already have. We can make things faster, smaller, and more convenient, but when will we get something totally revolutionary, like the steam engine or the incandescent lamp again? 100 years ago, many people didn't even graduate high school, yet they led prosperous lives. Now, if you don't graduate college, you're basically going to be below the average income. Sure, we know how to fill out our "Get to Know Your Friends" (hopefully, we get to know our friends before we befriend them) surveys on E-mails, but we lack the common sense that got us there. What's happening, America?