Information, yes -- informative, no.

The other day, I praised Stephanie Zacharek’s film criticism at Salon.com for being “delightfully comprehensive and slightly scattered,” but today I want to quickly draw attention to a passage of hers that is a model of perspicuity. Here’s the introduction to her review of the miniseries Bleak House:

Skimming is the new reading. As newspapers scramble to hold onto their dwindling audience, magazines shrink the size of their articles down to caption size (or replace them altogether with "charticles") and bloggers compete to capture whatever shards remain of our already fragmented attention, one thing is clear: The act of reading -- of hunkering down and focusing on one piece of writing at a time, all the way through -- is quickly becoming a luxury we can't afford, at least not if we're pretending to fight that losing -- and increasingly pointless -- battle known as "keeping up."

This passage almost makes me shudder, for even as I write this, I’m keeping up with a steady flow of emails, vaguely scanning news headlines, and working on multiple design projects.

I pointed out to a friend the other day that the work many of us now do in a day—researching and writing an essay or a section of a book, in his case—would’ve seemed like a gargantuan task not too long ago in college. We’re so used to processing dump trucks full of information that the big assignment for a semester is now just an item on an afternoon’s Post-It note to-do list, a short block of time initiated by a reminder from a PDA.

And of course, the constant stimulation of even a fairly relaxed workplace makes things even more hyper. It’s not unusual for me to receive more several hundred worth-reading emails a day, and the constant ping of Outlook alerting me to new messages means my attention span is shot completely to hell. I don’t think about one thing for three minutes, let alone three hours or—heaven forbid— three days. Pretty soon we'll all be Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic, hollowing out our childhood memories from our brains to make room for more information storage (although in Reeves' case, carving away brains probably wasn't all that much of an impediment).

Perhaps that’s part of the appeal, for me, of going to the movies—getting to sit in a darkened theater with no emails or phone calls or scrolling headlines for two hours and simply concentrate on one story, one set of circumstances. In the darkness of the screening room, there's no worrying about the 237 (at least) other things I’m supposed to be thinking about at any given time.

What Zacharek has caught onto and captured so precisely, I think, is the ever-increasing insistency of the information-driven life. For those of us working in and around industries that deal primarily with analyzing or delivering information, both the speed and amount of information available has increased immensely in the last few years. Even for those of us with terminally hyperactive minds geared toward gorging on new words and ideas, it can become a bit much. Back in 1985, before things began to really accelerate with the wide adoption of the internet, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil got it exactly right: the movie’s Ministry of Information Retrieval was a soulless filing cabinet for young up-and-comers where the pipes literally burst open with countless pages of mind-numbing information.

UPDATE: Apparently, the infoglut is bad enough that it warrants a panel on how if affects dating and relationships. It'll be good to finally get settled, though, the issue of whether or not you still have to call if you sent her a half dozen emails during the day.