Nicholas Carr, reviewing a book by one of the world-wide-web’s earliest architects, encourages the reader to touch some grass:

Not all technologies improve people’s lives. Just as Berners-Lee’s now omnipresent web shapes industries and markets, it shapes its users’ thoughts, perceptions, and relationships. As we’re slowly coming to understand, human beings did not evolve to be virtual creatures in a computer-generated world. The internet operates at a scale and speed that conflict with the brain’s deliberate pace of thought, the intellect’s slow accumulation of knowledge, and the psyche’s limited capacity for stimulation and social exchange. To be able to do anything and be anywhere at any moment seems liberating for a while, but it ends in a blurred and chaotic existence, the physical world’s familiar, steadying divisions of space and time dissolving in endless torrents of data. It’s an existence that may be vivifying to certain software programmers…but for the rest of us, the virtual world’s hyperkinetic superabundance ends up feeling like emptiness, a very, very busy void. We may be drawn to that void by our native attraction to information, novelty, and spectacle, but we’ll never make a home there.