I've been mooching about on the information super-highway of late and more than once found the stall warning lights sounding: overload, overload, pull up, pull up!
It's a mind-boggling space to fill in an hour or two and if you're anything like me you'll likely end the trip with a bit of a headache, and a fidgety inability to settle down with a good book.
Which is not surprising given that, according to Nicholas Carr, the internet is not only reshaping our lives but physically altering the way our brains operate.
He's just written a book called The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember.
This is the same man who, a couple of years back, wrote an essay for Atlantic magazine entitled, "Is Google Making us Stupid?"
Writes Carr: "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory ... Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy ... Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."
Carr's beef, as outlined in a recent John Naughton Observer article, is not so much with Google as with the continuously wired state of modern networking and the effect our dependence on the associated technology might be having on the very structure of our brains.
Apparently, advances in neuroscience have revealed our habitual practices can change the brain's precise physical configuration - and those practices include reading.
Carr suggests an addiction to networking involves a different kind of reading and thus a different neuronal arrangement.
Should we be concerned?
Here's cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf: "For me the essential question has become: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?"
In other words, sated by the constant bombardment of byte-sized digital stimuli, are we as a species losing the ability to read and think deeply and coherently?
The jury's out on this, less so on the social implications of aspects of internet-derived behaviour of those younger generations.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has been quoted as predicting that web users will one day be able to change their identities in order to cast off traces of a misspent youth indelibly imprinted on social networking sites such as Facebook.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time. I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," opined a cheerful-sounding Schmidt, before expounding on the wonders and opportunities of targeted advertising presented by the mobile web.
"We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are."
Not every one is so chirpy, including the civil rights and social justice groups which, a couple of weeks back, gathered to protest outside Google's campus in Mountain View, California.
Their focus was a "back-room deal" between the search engine and an outfit called Verizon.
In "Will Virtual Democracy Become Virtual Oligarchy?", published by The Nation magazine, John Nichols suggests the deal could be a significant step in the demise of "the civic and democratic values that have underpinned the digital revolution up to this point".
It supposedly threatens to "create a circumstance that would allow internet service providers to speed up access to some content while leaving the rest in the dust".
Big corporations could, he suggests, effectively buy speed, quality and other advantages - thus endangering "net neutrality".
But hang on a minute, are search engines like Google really neutral or value-free? Don't they already privilege "knowledge" on a kind of lemming-like popularity principle?
And what impact does it all have on the supply and demand of information, on journalism, and democracy?Eric Schmidt is right: we do need to think about these things.
Auckland University's Winter Lecture series The End(s) of Journalism? has made a timely contribution.
Concluding his talk, "Citizens as Gatekeepers", Luke Goode says: "The internet is bringing citizens greater choices and some really interesting opportunities for enriched forms of engagement with, and even participation in, the news.
It also brings some risks for citizens: of fragmentation and polarisation, of information overload and acceleration.
But the extent to which the internet can democratise the news is a much less important question than the extent to which it can help democratise democracy itself."
Phew! Now where did I put that book?
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
