I am begin­ning to won­der if it is pos­si­ble for me to single-task anymore.

Break­fast occurs to the back­drop of Twit­ter, Face­book and the most impor­tant overnight events as syn­the­sised into Google Reader. Con­ver­sa­tions occur against a back­ground of web-surfing and social net­work­ing, and most often these days, these con­ver­sa­tions them­selves take place on the inter­net. There’s always time to check Twit­ter while some­thing com­piles. My phone sits next to me as I cook, flick­ing through the net as saucepans bub­ble away.

And then there’s the evening, a dozen tabs open, some of them are play­ing video which seeps slowly into my brain as a back­ground process while I blog; Twit­ter and Face­book on 5-minute refresh, push e-mail, Reader on “1000+ items unread”. I’m on the net if I’m watch­ing TV. When read­ing a book, the ping of a new e-mail dis­tracts me imme­di­ately. And there’s always back­ground music.

Every time I try for some rea­son to single-task, it’s as if the Sys­tem Idle Process of my brain pokes my con­scious­ness every so often and says “isn’t there some­thing I could be doing?” I realise that many peo­ple, on dis­cov­er­ing this, have the urge to ‘inter­net detox’, to cut down their online activ­i­ties or try and go cold turkey and do with­out the inter­net for as long as possible.

But I don’t. I like this feel­ing. I love fill­ing my blood­stream with caf­feine, open­ing my eyes wide, becom­ing one with my code and with the back­ground buzz of the inter­net like some cyber­punk hacker kid. I don’t know what it’s doing to my head in the long run, but I don’t think it’s dam­ag­ing — it feels just like it’s opti­mis­ing itself dif­fer­ently. I’m by no means the first per­son to have encoun­tered this, and with the increas­ing pace of tech­nol­ogy and per­va­sive­ness of the net, I am a long long way from being the last. In 20 years, or maybe 120, we might dis­cover what hap­pens to soci­ety when everyone’s brains parallel-process in a way that ours are only just begin­ning to grasp.