Let me think about that.

Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively excerpted, political bloggers and cable news commentators blew up the story, it entered the Twitterverse, and boom, Sherrod was asked to resign from her position.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to have time to listen to the whole speech. Once they did, Sherrod was showered with apologies and found herself taking calls from the President.

This story is less about politics and more about pace. It provides a clear example of how our Facebook and Twitter behaviors are bleeding over into the rest of our lives. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs summed up the situation:

Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this have all made determinations and judgment without a full set of facts.

That’s an apt description of the new national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without a full set of facts.

When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.

That model works for some incoming data. I only need a few seconds to come up with my official response to much of what is shared by way of the realtime web: Farmville update (hide), Foursquare Check-in (ignore), Mel Gibson tape (email link to Rabbi), Kid in a watermelon (retweet).

Other news and information doesn’t necessarily fit into the new instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it’s getting more difficult to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the data that requires a little more consideration.

You want me to listen to an entire speech given by the the rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia? Come on. I have hundreds of incoming bits to either regurgitate or about which I need to render my rock solid opinion. You think it’s easy to become an expert pundit on topics as varied as phone antennas, oil spills, Lindsay Lohan’s jail experience, World Cup soccer and the inner workings of Mel Gibson’s phone etiquette in a single sitting?

Are you ever surprised by how certain you can be about your position on a topic that you only heard about 30 seconds before?

Where does this lead? Do we rebound from this trend and begin to compartmentalize that incoming information which requires deeper thought or does everything get put on the high speed and never ending instant-opinion assembly line?

I’ll answer that question with the three most endangered words in the blogosphere.

I don’t know.

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I just took my headphones off after spending the past fifteen minutes listening to some of the droning music that is being heralded as the newest way to get high. It’s call i-dosing and in some quarters, there is a concern that these thumping beats represent a dangerous trend and that the internet-delivered buzz could lead to other harmful activities.

Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones…

So, let me get this straight. Kids are putting on some headphones, lying down and cranking some really monotonous music and that’s supposed to be the internet-era drug we should worry about?

That’s like worrying that a crack addict is drinking too much decaf.

What we now call i-dosing are sounds previously known as binaural beats that have been used for research and sleep therapy. What’s amazing is that these beats are suddenly being viewed as something dangerous or even as an illicit drug. If anything, the i-dosers are taking a break from the real threat of the internet age: Information speedballs.

The multitaskers of Generation TMI are consumed by an always-on internet twitch that keeps them connected to news, friends, data, entertainment, academics, gaming and more; all of which is never farther than the palm of their hand. Not being able to read a book, watch a movie or interact with a friend without texting or opening Facebook is the drug-state of this era.

One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day. I heard from one parent whose kid broke ten thousand text messages in a month. Think he views a little downtime listening to white noise as a threatening scenario?

If i-dosing means putting on your headphones and being alone in your head for a few minutes at a time, then it sounds more like a cure than a disease. The participating kids think they are getting high, but they’re really feeling the sensation of turning off their social network and reducing multiple incoming feeds to one monotonous signal. And it makes perfect sense that, after being surrounded by incoming data from every angle, kids would look for a “high” by closing their eyes and covering their ears. Maybe i-dosing soundtracks are the Om sounds of the internet age?

Critics of i-dosing are worried that listening to these sounds over headphones could ultimately act as a gateway. But a gateway to what — just sitting there?

Here’s my message to kids: If you think narrowing things down to one incoming signal gets you high, wait until you try zero. The only thing better than being totally out of your mind is being totally in it.

Maybe I’m missing something here since I’m only about fifteen minutes into my first hit. I’ll put my headphones back on and give it another shot. But if this next tune doesn’t get me wasted enough, I’m switching to Bieber.

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I immediately began another streak of avoiding public school bathroom stalls.

Although that moment was traumatic, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. For me, junior high eventually ended and I never saw or heard of Big Paul again. Kids today don’t have it so easy. While they still go through the familiar childhood transitions, the process of dusting off the past and reinventing oneself is a much more complicated process. When today’s junior high students move on to high school or from high school to college, they are –  thanks to Facebook and other social networks — being followed by their digital selves.

The web won’t let the present become past.

Most of us choose a few friends and a few moments to carry with us as we progress through the stages of our youth and into adulthood. The rest is sloughed off like a snake’s skin or hammered deeply into our memory banks. When the social web emerged, folks in my cohort found ourselves reconnecting with some familiar names and faces from the distant past. Facebook, for us, is a nostalgia machine.

But things are different now. The always-on generation won’t use the realtime social web to reconnect with their childhood acquaintances because those connections will already have been maintained via tools like Facebook and Twitter. If you’re a child of the internet era, you will be followed by images and memories that used to be locked away in photo albums, scrapbooks and the unconscious.

My niece is about to enter a high school where she’ll know almost no one. Yet, she will also still be digitally connected to almost everyone from her eighth grade class — and that will likely remain the case for years to come. On one hand, she will be have extra support and the sense of security that accompanies familiarity. On the other hand, the process of really being free to re-invent her high school identity will require a new kind of focus. From the first day of high school onward, her new real world adventures will be tethered to a previous set of experiences that are never more than a flick of the scroll wheel away.

If I was a few years younger, Big Paul would still be in my social stream. He may not have gone to my high school and we may not have been direct friends, but through our extended network of connections, I would forever maintain a realtime awareness of where he was, what he looked like and which Farmville animals he had most recently strangled. Big Paul would’ve been virtually kicking in my stall door for years.

Welcome to an era when junior high never ends.

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This seems as good a place as any to share that thought. I’ve been thinking about his birthday for about a week, ever since Facebook told me about it. But I couldn’t decide what to do.

While I’ve enjoyed the occasional times we’ve spent together, I don’t know David Galbraith well enough to call him about something like this. If I sent him an email, he’d probably wonder how I even knew it was his birthday. On the other hand, I perceive our friendship to be just a little too cool — and both of us to be a little too cynical and even ornery — for me to join the masses with a simple click of a happy birthday button on Facebook. Even if I had posted on his wall, I wouldn’t know the right message length and tone to place me appropriately between his really good friends and some schmo he met in the lobby of an internet conference.

So I did nothing.

That’s been happening a lot these days. Facebook has thrown my birthday skills for a loop. Birthdays used to be the one social arena in which I excelled. Anytime anyone mentioned their birthday, I immediately entered it into my calendar. And then I never missed the occasion. When it came to birthdays, I was The Man. There were three things any friend of mine could count on when their birthday arrived. Cake, candles and a call from me.

But now everyone knows it’s your birthday. I used to be right up there with cake, but Facebook has commoditized my one and only social skill. I’ve been replaced by the computer. And it’s not just Facebook. I was the second person to wish my son a happy fourth birthday. The first was his dentist’s customer relations management software.

My own Facebook birthday was a complete disaster. I’ve been logging on to the site since before they opened it up to the general public and I swear, I’m well-liked on the outside. But when my birthday arrived, there was nothing more than a couple messages from those two friends everyone has who always comment on everything anyone posts. I expected my Facebook wall to look like Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party, and instead I got a panoramic shot from the now abandoned set of Deadwood. And this rebuff came only a couple months after I had to watch my wife my scroll the length of the Torah to get through her Facebook birthday wishes.

I started to make excuses for my nearly abandoned wall. Maybe there is something technically wrong with my account. Maybe my birthday isn’t in the system. Maybe a lot of my really good friends are still avoiding Facebook.

I wanted to call my friends one by one and explain the new reality. We all see each others’ birthday messages and we can all measure each others’ popularity by way of the new social statistics: Twitter followers and mentions, Facebook friends, and yes, birthday wishes on our Facebook wall. I don’t care about your phone calls or offers to take me out to dinner. Just log on and start clicking. I need the numbers. But you can’t beat the system. Everything from a failure to acknowledge a birthday to my own barren wall is there in the open for all to see.

Man, I miss the days when popularity was measured by something pure and simple like the amount of cash you got on your Bar Mitzvah.

But times have changed. So, Happy Birthday to you David Galbraith. I may not know you that well and I’m at least a week or two late, but I bet I’m the only one who wrote you an entire blog post for your birthday.

Unless my son’s dentist got to you first.

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Welcome to your life in the realtime stream.

Since I am strapped to this chair like the rest of you, I can’t quite figure out why the tweeting of an execution would come as much of surprise to anyone. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff recently made headlines when he served up a series of tweets related to Ronnie Lee Gardner’s execution by firing squad. On June 17 at 11:02pm, Shurtleff tweeted:

I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.

My first reaction was that this event was too serious for Twitter. There is something sick about reducing a solemn act to a few characters. Are we entering an age when an execution can be stayed because the WiFi went down?

But in many ways, the execution-related tweet makes perfect sense. Twitter is where we are. And it’s where we get news. As Mark Shurtleff explained: “I believe in an informed public. As [an] elected official I use social media to communicate directly with people.”

Often, we’re not allowed to see the machinery of the state at work and here at least we got a realtime update on what was happening by an actual human being involved in the proceedings. I get that. And I also get that, like millions of others, Shurtleff is a person who likes to share details about his professional life and who surely enjoys his growing following on Twitter. Of course he is going to share this highly newsworthy moment in his career.

Shurtleff’s tweet made news because of its novelty. But like all sharing in the internet age, that novelty will wear off. The fifth or fiftieth tweet about an execution will not make headlines. And you should expect more of this content to come your way. This stream will not be dammed.

Whether or not a realtime, social tool like Twitter is the right delivery mechanism for news of this sort is already a moot question. Now, the more critical question is how we — the recipients, curators and creators of these relentless snippets — will manage the constant barrage of often wildly unrelated pieces of information.

How do we quickly differentiate blurbs that are almost entirely outside our personal experiences from those with which we have a deeply personal connection?

In a medium that combines birthday wishes and Starbucks check-ins along with sports scores, weather and the latest updates from Utah’s firing squad, it won’t be easy. The line between you and the outside world of news and information is becoming increasingly blurred. And if you can’t easily determine what you should be looking at, you end up looking at everything.

When do we pause? Which stories are worth an extra click? Should we know any details about the victims of Ronnie Lee Gardner’s crimes? Do we need to know anything about Gardner’s own biography?

Is this story close enough to our own daily lives to go deeper, or does this batch of 140 characters just pass us by along with the other data of the moment?

I probably had a good answer to that question when the story was fresh, but that was a few hundred million tweets ago. Who has the time to think about legacy content from a bygone era? Even Mark Shurtleff has moved on. A few tweets after announcing Utah’s execution by firing squad, he offered this:

USA WINS! USA WINS! Donovan on 90+1min goal advances USA into World Cup Round of Sixteen!

Rat-a-tat-tat.

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When I was a kid, our family dinners lasted about seven minutes. My dad never said much back then and we had a strict rule that there was no television during dinner. We were told to shut off the box. We sat down at the table. And we ate, fast.

Then my parents discovered the wondrous pleasures of Wheel of Fortune and everything changed. We turned on the box and our dinners were filled with loud attempts to guess the word or phrase before the people on the show did. Every so often, a contestant who already had to know the answer would buy an extra vowel or two just to be sure. My dad, the formerly silent anti-television guy at the head of the table would turn red and cry out: “Vhat is he buying a vowel for vhen he knows the answer?”

Back then I felt like that was just the right amount of interactivity when it came to watching television. And I still feel that way today.

But if progress has its way, those days will soon be long gone. The realtime, social web came after my laptop, it came after my telephone, it came after my social life, my career, my cohort and my concentration. And now it’s coming after my television. Each time I gave over to the force of my technology addiction. But this is where I where I draw the line. This is where I lie back on my couch wielding my remote like Yoda’s lightsaber and make a stand. You’re not getting my TV.

But it’s probably a losing battle. Every significant technology company in the world wants the anchor spot at the center of your living room and the race is on to elegantly merge TV with the internet.

It’s all starting innocently enough. We get a few more shows on demand. We can access Netflix and YouTube on our televisions. We can schedule our DVRs with our mobile phones. All of these tools add to our television-watching experience. But it won’t stop there. The internet will eat its way onto your couch by way of your television. There will be a few apps here, a few tweets there, and gradually your peanut-shaped remote control will evolve into a keyboard, and then a touch screen. And boom, your television will be part of the web.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at Google’s own description of its TV initiative.

Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet.

You know what I want the TV I know and love to be combined with? Nothing. I know and love it the way it is.

I want the freedom and the power that comes from turning off the internet and losing myself in a great show. When I sit back on my couch to watch TV, I don’t want to say Hmmm, I want to say Ahhh.

Don’t get me wrong. I know and love the internet too. But every combination of two good things does not equal a peanut butter and chocolate moment. The net and TV are more like wine and beer. Sometimes I want to sip quietly and discuss things like soil, vintage and region. Other times I just want to do a few keg stands and pass out.

As TV becomes more interactive, I think we’ll see more and more people heading away from their living rooms and back to public theaters where they can enjoy focused and uni-task entertainment in an environment where attendees are ordered to turn off their cell phones.

In the mean time, we’ll count on TV to offer an escape from work and web. My wife and I spend almost all of our time staring at the web or talking to each other in broken sentences over the tops of our Macbook screens. But then, Jersey Shore will come on and we’ll hear something truly absurd come out of Snooki’s mouth as she cannonballs into the rooftop hot tub and we’ll start to complain about how crazy that show is. And before you know it, our laptops are closed and we’re bonding over a communal awe-laced contempt for The Situation’s abs.

In my house, even bad television can create some real life interactivity. Of course, we enjoy ourselves all the more when we watch a great episode of Mad Men or Friday Night Lights. But like Vanna White and Pat Sajak before her, even Snooki can bring us together as a family.

Isn’t it crazy that in the internet age watching television can pass as an activity that creates a sense of real life community in a household? We all get off our individual internet screens and focus on one big screen together. It isn’t reading by lantern with the Ingalls in our Little House on the Prairie or waiting for everyone in our darkened house to say goodnight to John-Boy, but it’s what we’ve got.

Before too long, my wife and I will close our laptops and shut off the internet and when we look up at the TV, we’ll see our email, Facebook and Twitter accounts staring right back at us. My kids will eventually break us down and we’ll all be sitting around the dinner table watching the internet. And after a few too many glasses of wine I’ll pound my fist on the table and shout out: “Vhy did that guy just buy a vowel?” And my kids won’t even look up from their keyboards.

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In his recent New York Times piece Mind Over Mass Media, Pinker, a renown cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Harvard, lashes out at a series of recent articles that he sees as representations of the “moral panic” about the rise of new media. The brain, Pinker explains, is not being fundamentally altered by Twitter, Facebook and other internet tools.

Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.

Pinker dismisses fears that the internet is doing real damage to our noggins. But he underestimates the addictive nature of the beast, and the extent to which the realtime, social web can affect our behaviors, our ability to concentrate and our relationship with the real world.

Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life.

Sure, distraction is not a new phenomenon. But this kind of distraction is. People in my generation went from having no connectivity to walking around with a pocketful of our extended social network, an incoming stream of realtime data, and much more.

Come on. Who are you going to believe: some brain expert analyzing your internet usage from his ivory tower of academia or me, a sick, twitchy freak who is eyeball deep in the same social opium den as the rest of you addicts?

Pinker suggests that these distractions can be overcome with a little self-control: Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.

But here’s the problem. For millions of people, email and Twitter are integral to their work. And their work days extend into their nights. Your spouse calls you to bed at a decent hour, but when you get there, she’s got her laptop open. The realtime web is, increasingly, everywhere. Sure, you can put your Blackberry away at dinner, but what about the iPad from which you’re reading your recipe for dessert? Yes, you can turn off your computer and curl up with a good novel. Except your novel is now being read on a device that also serves up your Twitter and email. The social web is in your videogames, it’s on your TV and soon it will be in your cars.

You try to hide but the web finds you.

During the same period that Pinker’s article appeared in the New York Times, the most popular piece on that site was titled, Your Brain on Computers: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In.

Was that article so widely read because every parent is panicking about their brains being altered? No, it’s because for many parents, that title could have been written by their conscience.

You know why you see so many articles on this topic? Because so many journalists are early adopters and have moved their work and their lives onto portable devices where they research, write and then track how well their articles are being trafficked and disseminated around the realtime web. I have spent the last decade working with internet professionals — the people who fund, design, build and promote the web. I don’t know a single one of these people who hasn’t worried about the extent to which this technology has taken over their lives and infiltrated countless quiet moments that were once reserved for an uninterrupted walk with their kids or a little while alone with a good book.

If the early adopters are worrying about the role of realtime technologies in their lives now, you can bet everyone else will be worried about it soon.

And they should be.

The other night I was at a restaurant with three of my best friends who are following wildly different career paths. We spent the entire dinner wondering whether the realtime, social web was negatively impacting our personal, intellectual and even creative lives. At one point we noticed that two out of the five people having dinner together at the adjacent table were on their iPhones.

We’re really talking about two internets here. Pinker’s internet — a mass media repository of knowledge and creativity that should be embraced. And the other internet that can ruin your dinner (and your life).

Of course, we shouldn’t panic. But a guy who follows only two people on Twitter telling me not to worry about the impact of the realtime web is like a guy who’s had his first sip of a wine spritzer telling people at an A.A. meeting that everything will be fine as long as they just show a little restraint.

I’ll accept Pinker’s big ideas about the human brain, I just think he massively downplays the impact the realtime web has on our behavior. He ends his piece with this claim: Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Follow a few more people on Twitter and then tell me that.

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Don’t get me wrong. I dabbled in the web as a user. But it was always with the bigger picture in mind. It was always with a purpose. I was in charge. I was in control.

Those days are over. Like Tony Montana, I didn’t follow the advice about getting hooked on the product. As the realtime, social web has erupted, so too has my transition from being a dealer to being a dealer and a hardcore user. I’ve been denying this reality for years. I easily convinced myself that I wasn’t the Nurse Jackie of the internet. I told myself I was just taking a little taste to make sure I understood the product I was serving out to others — the civilians, the suckers. But it was a lie.

The other day, after spending my usual ten to twelve hours in front of this laptop I decided to restart my machine. I checked my email. I refreshed my Tweetie. I double-checked Facebook. I loaded Google Reader to make sure I was entirely up to date on all the news from the latest Afghanistan troop levels to the attempts to stop the gallons of crude from bubbling into the Gulf to the current quotes from the Mel Gibson tapes to the latest reactions to Antennagate. Finally, after a quick check of my realtime blog stats, I took a deep breath and pressed the restart button.

Within five seconds, I picked up my iPhone and checked my email.

Suddenly self-aware, I paused. I looked at my sweat-beaded reflection in the still darkened laptop screen and I realized that yes, I am high on my own supply. I used the next couple minutes of restart time for some personal reflection about the way the internet now controls me and how, as I’ve written here before, I went from using a tool to being one.

A few weeks ago I was hosting my son’s fourth birthday party at an old school arcade. We were running short on quarters, so I went to throw a few dollars in the change machine. While I waited for my bills to become change, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and checked my email. It was Sunday morning. It was my son’s birthday party.

I often fall asleep to audiobooks. That leaves my iPhone on my nightstand. Recently, while my wife and I spent the sunrise hours cuddling and joking with our kids, I heard the vibration of an incoming email. I rolled over and checked it.

In the last year, I haven’t driven a commute of more than 15 minutes — or walked more than five — without opening at least one app on my iPhone.

Last weekend, everyone in my house heard what sounded like a deep breathing sound in our kitchen. Then I open the door and I heard it in the backyard too. I started to get nervous. It was the kind of sound that would provide an appropriate backdrop to a horror movie that was just about to get scary. I walked to the front of my driveway. I explored the garage. I put my ear to heating ducts and water pipes. Everywhere, I heard the sound. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. I ran back into the house to tell the kids to pack a bag, we were getting out of there. Then my daughter pointed to my pocket. I reached in and pulled out my iPhone on which I had inadvertently opened the Balloonimals app which makes a blowing noise until you start the game.

Suddenly I knew what Tony Montana meant when he said, “Say hello to my little friend.”

At the moment, I felt stupid. But then I realized that the breathing was real. My iPhone is alive. I hear it breathing right now. Do you hear yours?

I went from being the Tony Montana who came to Miami with nothing and worked his way to the top through a combination of sheer will, toughness and a knack for avoiding chainsaws, to being the Tony Montana who was unconsciously fantasizing about his sister and yelling obscenities to an empty room while soaking neck-deep in a cocaine-fueled bubble bath.

The realtime web has become a habit. It’s a twitch. I do it without thinking. More importantly, when I succumb to the reflex of checking it every few minutes or seconds, I do so at the expense of thinking. When is the last time you stood in line at a bank without checking your iPhone? What about waiting for a long stoplight or sitting at a restaurant counter? Those moments, now dominated by the internet reflex must have been used for something else before all this technology climbed into our pockets. What were we thinking about when we had all that extra time?

I don’t remember. But I’m pretty sure it was more important than all these updates I habitually check.

When the WiFi went down during the official iPhone 4 demo, didn’t you sort of wish Steve Jobs would turn to the crowd and say, “You know what, let’s just talk.”

But that could have never happened. We know from his late night email exchanges with customers that Steve Jobs is no longer just a dealer either.

Is there a pill for this twitch or a salve to slow this reflex? I don’t know. While I search, I hear the constant repetition of an updated version of another Scarface quote.

You gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.

Then you get the iPhone.

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At the time, I was teaching African American literature at a high school in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. On a day when the class was discussing Native Son by Richard Wright, we had a guest student who was visiting from Los Angeles. This was the only time during my New York teaching career when I wasn’t the only white person in the class.

We had reached the point in the novel where its main character Bigger Thomas had committed his second murder and was hiding from police in Chicago’s tenements. I began that day’s class with a simple question: If you lived in neighborhood where Bigger Thomas was hiding and you knew his location, would you tell the police?

The question set off a heated debate in the classroom. A third of the students said that they wouldn’t turn Bigger in to the police because the justice system was too biased and Bigger would never get a fair trial. Another third of the class said that they’d feel compelled to turn him in because, regardless of the failings of the justice system, murder is morally wrong. The remaining students explained that they too would turn Bigger Thomas over to the police — but for a more concrete reason. They didn’t want to be the next victim. A violent person on the streets simply increased the likelihood of getting killed.

I then asked the students how many of them had either been victims of a gunshot or knew someone who had been murdered. Every hand in the class went up.

At the end of the class, our guest from Los Angeles approached my desk to let me know that her Advanced Placement English class had just completed the same novel. During the two weeks they spent on the book, not a single issue we had just debated ever came up. She said that if I had asked the same opening question to her class, every student would have said that they’d turn Bigger over to the police. They might have even thought the question was a joke.

Of course, we didn’t need to travel across the country to find a classroom of students who would have been shocked by our discussion. The same disconnect would have existed if our classroom guest had been from a high school on the other side of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

It was at that moment that I realized that the widespread multicultural education movement of that era was largely based on a fallacy. The focus of the effort was to make sure kids read books by authors from diverse backgrounds (although too often, that really meant reading more books by people from their own ethnic or racial group). But neither the students in my class nor the ones in the AP English class in Los Angeles were truly experiencing multicultural education. What we really needed was to get the two classes together to discuss the book. Any book would become part of an effective multicultural curriculum if the people discussing it came from multiple cultures.

At that time, the notion of congregating a socioeconomically diverse classroom of students seemed like an impossible task. But then we all saw the introduction of the web. As soon as this new technology began to take hold, I was sure that it would provide the perfect channel to connect kids — not just across the world but across the park.

After moving back to the Bay Area, I started a non-profit site to accomplish this very goal. The pitch was simple. We no longer had to wait for politicians or intolerant citizens to grant approval for diversity. We could use the web to tunnel under all the social blockades and connect kids and teachers like never before, from Crown Heights to Park Slope, from Pacific Heights to Hunters Point. A broken system of segregation could finally be subverted. It would be busing without the buses.

The site’s success was ultimately thwarted by timing. Most schools were barely getting online back then. But my certainty about an increase in diversity across schools and neighborhoods remained strong. And now the web is beyond anything I imagined. The tools capable of hammering through the historic barriers between communities are always on and nearly ubiquitous.

Yet while I spend much of my life in front of this screen, I find myself in a pool of ideas that is even more segregated than the high school classroom where I once taught. There is almost no racial and ethnic diversity in my web experience.

Amazingly, I also encounter less diversity in the media I consume. When I lived in New York, I read Newsday cover to cover during my subway commute. My media consumption reflected the communities beneath which the 3 Train traveled. Today, a huge percentage of the media I consume has been shared by folks in my direct social network. I know a whole lot about Zuckerberg sweating the privacy issues and how Steve Jobs feels about Flash, but I have absolutely no connection to any of the conversations taking place in neighborhoods a couple miles from my front door.

Somehow the forces that separated us in the offline world have maintained their power even as our ability to connect has dramatically increased. We’re still stuck in our silos of homogeneity.

I’m sure I could blame the lack of diversity on my age, my location, and my addiction to the internet industry. But I doubt that’s all there is to it. The first time I loaded up Netscape I was certain that the walls between people and neighborhoods would come crumbling down. The young, idealistic, school-teacher me would have never have believed that nearly two decades later I’d feel, in many ways, more isolated than ever. And although I haven’t been back for awhile, I’d guess that the high school kids in Crown Heights are still stuck on their side of the park.

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We were followed into our assigned vehicle by a woman with a bluetooth headset who asked for our attention and explained that the wedding would be delayed for a few hours. There were three helicopters already hovering above the original site, so the wedding planners had to quickly move to plan B.

That’s just how it is when you attend a celebrity wedding. It’s all about maintaining some sense of privacy for an event that is supposed to be limited to friends and family. Of course, nothing about my celebrity wedding experience should come as much of a surprise. While they get the benefits of sharing their work with the masses and the perks associated with being well known, we constantly hear celebrities complaining about invasions of their privacy.

But on some level, we must not believe these complaints. Because on Facebook and other social sites, we willingly volunteer the same private information celebrities go to such great lengths to protect. And our sharing goes well beyond the simple details of a wedding.

One of the key questions of this era is: Why do we share what we share?

In his recent article, In Praise of Oversharing, Steven Johnson wrote about colleagues who shared sometimes graphic details about life-threatening health challenges.

[Jeff] Jarvis is a friend of mine, but it may tell you something about the strange mediated state of 21st-century friendships that I first found out about his cancer diagnosis in a Twitter update that he sent out linking to his original blog post. This is how we live now: we get news that we’re facing a life-threatening disease, and the instinctive response is, I’d better tweet this up right away … The writer Howard Rheingold started a blog — called Howard’s Butt — to chronicle his battle with colon cancer. The 64-year-old British technology journalist Guy Kewney blogged through the final months of his life after a year-long battle with colorectal cancer.

It doesn’t really surprise me that professional bloggers would share details of their deeply personal trials with thousands of complete strangers. I understand the mindset of the lifelong oversharer. I am one of them. I could be neck deep in quicksand but if I could free up an arm, I’d be blogging about it and trying to rattle off one last pithy title like, That Sinking Feeling.

We expect lifelong oversharers to view the realtime, social web as a more efficient way to overshare. But this phenomenon is hardly restricted to people in a desperate quest for pageviews. Millions and millions of people, across generations, are waving to the sky to make sure the hovering helicopters follow them on the journey through their daily experiences.

Back in 1999, Douglas Adams wrote an interesting piece on the then very new consumer internet. He argued that the technology merely enables us to express our natural leanings:

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

That is a compelling explanation of what would become the explosion of sharing on the web. But does it fully explain more surprising examples of oversharing — beyond anything most people do in a terrestrial village? I know infinitely more about friends of friends of friends on the net than I do about the families who live next door. Does our need to reconnect with small communities explain why the occasional conversation on the old front stoop has evolved into us living our whole lives – from medical challenges to location check-ins to deeply personal relationships – on the new virtual front stoop? The community we’ve created online is clearly different than the lost village it replaced.

Recently, my wife came across the status update of a friend of a friend via her Facebook feed. The update gave intimate details about the actions of an abusive boyfriend and the ensuing home visits by the police. By the time I looked over her shoulder to see the post, several other people had responded to the story with similar stories of their own and promises of steadfast support.

The status update seemed shocking at first. But maybe the responses to the update were exactly what the person needed at that moment. Or maybe those who responded are similarly consumed by the temptation to publish every experience and reaction.

Is Facebook and the broader social web really a legitimate place to seek community and rebuild our lost villages? Did the emergence of the realtime, social web offer a cure for a generation suffering from pent up longing and loneliness? Or has it simply provided an addictive information thoroughfare that has evolved faster than our ability to show restraint? Are these immediate, public, reflex-driven responses really our new version of community?

I’m not sure. It’s probably too early to tell. In the meantime, as I sit in front of this screen, I feel a lot like I did when I stood in front of that hotel waiting for a shuttle to take me to an unknown location. I don’t know where we’re going, but I’m getting on board with the rest of you. It might make sense to pull over every now and then so we can get our bearings and figure out which direction we’re headed.

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