There's something about electric communication that is a little bit unsettling to the consciousness or puts us in a state that's relatively unsettled. This has been the case for over 150 years now with the invention of the telegraph. We feel like we're speeding up and accelerating and that can be very exciting and useful in some ways but in the end it doesn't afford focus the way that non-electric modes of reading and experiencing information do. That's something we're still wrestling with.

If you're really a digital person and you have been spending your days connected and you haven't had time away from the screen for weeks or months or even years for some people, it's very hard to even grasp what it feels like to spend a couple of full days offline and how different it is. The way in which your perception and your thoughts and really your whole experience just go into a different gear. You can't do it by going offline for one day.

— William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry – Boing Boing