or “Lousy Job, Internet”
In the beginning, it’s all sweetness and light. You’re trying to pull together lots of discrete nuggets of information to support a case your making for a knock-em-dead blog posting. You’ve bashed out a first draft, which you tweak as you seek the hyperlinks to this factoid, that quotation. You’re in the zone, going with the flow. You might even get through a whole article or two of your own writing, and posting, marvelling at how any intellectual work ever got done before Mr Berners-Lee came along.
But that sweetness gets hyperglycaemic, that light fries your eyes. The synapses that would rather be partying send out their siren calls. Instead of just grabbing the url of something you’ve already read, you browse the page for a few seconds. “Oh, THAT looks interesting,” and you click… Maybe once or twice you’ll rein yourself in. “No, no. I’ll bookmark that and come back to it later.” But, in the absence of a big hairy audacious deadline your powers of self-regulation will wane, your distracability will reign. It will happen suddenly, like a the Bohr shift (fn 1), and without you really knowing you’re crossing the threshold to sleep. And, hours later and woozy, you surface from google-pool, in oxygen deprivation with a pounding head and dry red eyes. Your elegant post is squatting there, unfinished, reproachful…
How do I know all this? Bitter experience. How did I compose this? Off line and then with a list of urls to pull. Curse you Vannevar Bush. Your memex machine has become a meme x-rated orgy.
(fn 1) The very notion of “non-linearity” points to an assumption of stability and predictablity (with Humans at the Centre of Creation). See this post on non-linearity at the new “Intellectual Self-Defence” site.
Related reading
48-hour Internet outage plunges Nation into productivity (Onion)
Report: 90% of Waking Hours Spent Staring at Glowing Rectangles (Onion)
dwighttowers.wordpress.com 
A facebooker has commented as follows-
“I have streams of exchange on Facebook that is incredibly inspiring and energizing, including for my areas of paid work, therefore i would call Facebook productivity enhancing.
I guess for building social capital in the sense you promoted in… a previous post, Facebook has also turned out to be productivity enhancing, as i can relate in a meaningful/ supporting manner with more friends (now scattered geographically and increasingly difficult to keep up with face-to-face and/or one-on-one.
The level of friends’ engagement is today the only clearly visible limit to how efficient Facebook can make me.”
Same facebooker has kindly expanded:
I typically avoid web un-moderated and totally public web commenting because THAT is too time consuming and limited value added (to me). I guess I never tried to carry out my “ordinary” work tasks online. I get on Facebook during big and small breaks or in my “free time” or I just post something relating to work. A bit like monitoring text messages (I mostly do it on my phone, on the bus, by the printer, as a virtyal “coffee table” when I work from home etc). Maybe the productivity level depends mostly on type of work you try to achieve on the side, and how well organized and disciplined you are? And prone for distraction? Needless to say, constant “productivity” (in the classical sense; always trying to achieve something) doesn’t occur to me as a good thing. (For health, life quality, sense of perspective, compassion or generosity – which might in fact be the highest and most neglected form of achievement?!)