The NY Times has a scary piece today on the way interrupt-driven life works for the modern family with everyone checking a raft of bleeping gadgets channeling the torrent of messages and interruptions that the digital age spawns. It is particularly poignant because most people will recognize some part of themselves in it, whether it is the multitasking of media consumption, or the complete inability to linearly perform tasks without self-imposed interruptions.

The piece comes on the heels of Nick Carr's latest book, "The Shallows" (which I am actually looking forward to reading in an uninterrupted manner), a treatise about how our brains are literally being rewired by the new type of stimuli provided by the connected age. In my own case, I've definitely noticed this trend: as Twitter, Facebook and their ilk have gained steam over the last few years, I've found myself taking up all of the white space in my life "catching up" with the duplicate streams of links, updates, and other meaningless junk. I thought at first I picked up this bad habit during my tenure at the world's largest tech supermarket, but I've come to realize that it has just as much to do with the combination of the smartphone and the new constantly updating web services whose primary metaphor is "the stream."

As much as I may worry about it in my case, I worry about it much more in the case of my kids whose brains are just being wired to learn now. While it is possible that this constantly shrinking attention span will lead to new modalities for learning and generally coping with the world, it's too early to tell, and what is more, deep thinking provides advantages we've got a few millennia of evidence for.