I lost my Blackberry a couple of months ago after owning it for a little bit more than a year. Of course, it was an inconvenience having to cover my tracks. I set the thing to lock itself, so I wasn't too worried about someone calling Aboukir on my dime or deleting my email. But I had to get a new SIM card and I changed the passwords on all of the accounts it was linked to. I kept it backed up pretty regularly so I don't think I lost many contacts or notes.

This was about a week before I left for Africa, and I still had my clunky little Ericsson, so there was little point in replacing the phone. Then, by the time I got back I had gotten out of the habits associated with a constant feed of information, and I'm still using the clunker. It's sort of a pain to write text messages now, which also turns out to be fine. It's nice to hear voices.

One of the explanations for why a lot of people in rich countries are obese, which I think I first heard from Michael Pollan, is that our appetitive systems are adapted to situations where food is scarce and sweetness tends to indicate a high-value resource. So in places where the food is loaded with high fructose corn syrup and all kinds of sweeteners, most people have a hard time controlling how much they eat. I suspect an analogous situation exists for the human mind encountering the Internet. Like acquiring food for most of history, learning is slow and laborious. It's punctuated by moments of realization and mastery, when the pieces fall together and enable a new level of comprehension. Those moments are the payoff: they reinforce the behaviors that led up to them. And it's powerful stuff, as anyone who's encountered the life of the mind can attest.

The hypothesis is that the Internet, or more specifically the modes of presenting and transmitting information that the Internet enables, have greatly increased the availability of those payoffs. It's not just that more and more data is available online; there's an increase in the degree of interconnectedness. Back in the days of books and newspapers, if you mentioned a person or a concept, you had to rely on your reader's knowledge. The best you could do was cite a reference you used. Of course, references lead to other references, and a dedicated reader could follow citations in the same way we click on links. And I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to make the claim, which has always sounded a bit ridiculous to me, that we're learning or socializing in new ways because of new technology. The difference is in the speed, which I claim can make a qualitative difference. It's just like the sugar: the biochemical mechanisms for processing carbohydrate and protein molecules are the same, but the higher-level mechanisms for regulating how we seek out those molecules aren't able to deal with an overabundance of sugar. The result is that the energy in the sugar is not properly integrated into the organism, and a qualitative transition from health to sickness.

Maybe in ten years or so people will be ready for a Slow Information movement.