Lots of press these days on multitasking and shortened attention spans, but apparently the problem goes pretty far back. According to William Wordsworth people were disconnected from real life, because of
“the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid commmunication of intelligence hourly gratifies.”
Wow, imagine if they had email two hundred years ago how much worse it could have been!
(from the June 2007 Harper’s Magazine, p. 89)