Critical information overload
Provocative piece in today's Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman talks about the growing demands on our informational intake, noting the phenomena of 'surfer's voice' (the distracted conversational tone of someone who's paying more attention to a computer screen than to the voice at the other end of the phone), 'absent presence' (cellphone users paying more attention to the voice at the other end than to their physical surroundings), and other anthropological artifacts of our multitasked world.
