I’ve just been watching How to disconnect from your online life on BBC World News America (15 September). Some pretty obvious stuff but there’s an interview with Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus, which I feel I must comment on.

I totally 100% agree that the cost of making something public used to be expensive. Now it’s not. It might as well be free if you discount the time spent creating the content (which, perhaps, we shouldn’t). But I totally disagree that the cost of keeping something private is now expensive. How? All you have to do is do nothing. Don’t take part in the first place. OK, once you’ve made something public it is now very expensive indeed (and I’d say almost impossible) to make it private again but that’s surely another point? 

What I do think has happened is that we have exchanged privacy for ego in many instances.

Max, what do you think?

Professor Michael Abramson at Monash University in Australia has found that: “repeated predictive texting is likely to be training young people to act fast without thinking”. Furthermore, we are starting to shy away from tasks that take too long, things with uncertain benefits, and processes that do not offer immediate results.

This, I believe, is a very slippery slope. I suspect that accidental encounters with information and ideas will become less common in the future because we will use technology to filter out individuals or screen out experiences that do not fit with pre-set patterns or opt-in requests. As a result, reality may become almost invisible to many individuals. We will be highly connected to the world around us but most of this connection will be through digital filters and virtual channels. Many subtle physical and emotional signals could be minimised or even lost. Fleeting eye contact with a stranger on a train will become a more remote possibility because we will exist in our own behavioural bubbles, our eyes and ears set on divert to various sensory and escapist pleasures (see “iPod oblivion” on wordspy.com).

It will be a world that is highly conformist in terms of structure and highly personalised in terms of experience. I believe our minds will become muddled and muddy as a result. And if we are not pre-filtering or personalising media, we will have it done for us. The news cycle is accelerating and information is already delivered in snack-sized packages that often ignore or misrepresent broad context and understanding.

This point is raised by the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Charles Feldman in his book No Time To Think. Feldman speculates that if our current 24-hour news cycle had been applied to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, there would have been tremendous pressure to act immediately – and this could have resulted in Armageddon.

We will almost never be alone either. Machines will anticipate what we want based on previous behaviour or they will predict what we need, based on the patterns hidden in vast trails of digital data that we, knowingly or unknowingly, leave behind us.

A UK report looking at how parents play with their children has found that 21% of parents have forgotten how to play with their kids. The survey of 2,000 parents and 2,000 children conducted by Prof. Tanya Byron, a psychologist and child therapist, also found that childhood games are under threat from parental overwork and an emerging generation gap.

Almost 1 in 3 parents now play computer games with their kids, but 9 in 10 kids would prefer to play alone. Despite this, 7 out of 10 kids would rather play with their parents outside or engage in traditional games with their family.

One especially worrying finding to my mind is that the ‘experts’ feel that parents now need to be given official advice and direction (from TV celebrities and ‘Childhood Tzars’ I assume) about how to play with their own kids.

Yesterday I found that having spent several hours going through a mountain of recent emails I still had almost 3,000 unread. They all dated prior to July 15, so I decided to do something naughty. I hit the Apple A command and deleted all of them, sight unseen. I can’t tell you how good this felt. I don’t know quite what was in there, although I’d guess about 30% was spam, 50% was things I’d opted into and 20% I have no idea. It’s possible that there was something important in there, but I figured if there was it would resurface sooner or later.

Next I’m getting rid of a load of RSS feeds and Google alerts, most of which seem to be compounding the problem of too much information rather than helping to solve it. Anyway, what was I thinking when I set up an alert for “Indian statistics”?

My overall aim here is to consume less digital media and to chew things over properly. This should leave more room for a few much bigger helpings of the things that I find especially tasty.

Stat of the day. In 2008, people in the US people consumed three times as much information as they did in 1960. Cerebral obesity? Perhaps not.