Lunch with a friend last week reinforced some of my own behavior. She's pursuing her Master's Degree, and because of that she's slowly pulling herself out of other activities - something that I've done more than once over the years to the seeming dismay of varied social networks. One day I'm really interested in something and immerse myself in it. Weeks later, it no longer interests me and I seem to disappear from that region, perhaps still existing on the fringes - sort of like what I have done with Second Life recently. Why? Much the same reason.

Time is finite. Time management is imperative for one's sanity. And thus, triage of interests happens at times. A long trail of interests and people I know because of them follows my lifetime, but no one branch defines my life. Instead, my life defines the branches - and long ago I learned that Life is something that takes you along it's own path despite your interests elsewhere.

I remember a time when I was not connected to a collective consciousness known as the Internet. Even when I got connected, reading Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books) had me stretching for more. For over a decade, I have drank of the collective consciousness and have added to it a bit, here and there.

So why was it an advertisement for a writing tablet, the Neo, caught my fancy? Was it that it's an electronic device that is portable and would allow me to write anywhere? No, that wasn't it. I'll quote what caught my eye:

No distractions. NEO has no Internet access, no email connections, no text messaging, no game or video capabilities. It’s strictly for writing.

Never before have I seen an advertisement for a machine that purposefully ignores the Internet and uses it as a selling point. And never before have I found that thought attractive. The truth is that, despite myself, I have managed to do what the machine advertises for the majority of my time - but the very thought of it and the fact that I find it attractive is noteworthy.

I wonder how many other people are out there thinking the same thing, that they need to get away from everything so that they can think about something. Then their mobile phone rings and the chime of emails received evokes it's Pavlovian response. Have we become trained to become distracted?

The first months I had back in Trinidad and Tobago were a test for me - I resolutely ignored Time. I did not wear a watch. I slept until I was sated, I awoke when I was not tired. I had no Internet access. Books were read, things were scribbled, and the world seemed so much more open than it had been when sucked through a pipe. Despite this, I sank into the distraction of the Internet once I got connected again. And that connection ruled me for a long time, where I would sit at the keyboard for up to 20 hours a day.

Where is that peace of mind? People speak highly of our ability to communicate across the globe instantaneously, but where's the squelch? While Spam slows us all down, little has been done about it other than creating markets for products and services that combat spam... products and services which thrive because of spam, so that there is interest in not solving the problem. Websites compete for our interest, waving anything from pornography to connecting with people (and sometimes both) as a means to compete with other websites.

But websites don't seem too interested in competing with the real world. Why? When you're offline, you're not on their website. You're not generating page impressions and click-throughs for advertising. You're not buying their products, or spending money on their services. Distracting you from your own world is lucrative, you see.

And while all of this might seem like a Luddite response - it isn't. What it is remains very simple: removing distractions. The next time you get an email or visit a website, ask yourself how this fits into your life... if it does, if it is important, then it is not a distraction.

But more than likely it is. And while it's cool to be in the group of cool kids who wear distraction like armor and quote single lines from articles without understanding context, what is the price of being cool? But they won't tell you that. It's not in their interest to do so.

Frankly, it's not in mine either... and yet it is. Why? Because I'm not going to sit here enslaved to the collective and not spend time doing things I wish to or need to. And neither should you. The collective consciousness is only as good as the things we bring to it... and these days, one has to wonder whether the consciousness is suffering from it's own intellectual inbreeding.