When it comes to the digital networks that now surround us, the fact is that most us can’t just GTFO, even if we wanted to. The sooner we move beyond the addiction metaphor, the sooner we’ll be able to see, with some clarity and honesty, the extent and implications of our dependency on our networked computing and media devices.

What happens to the human self as it comes to experience more and more of the world, and of life, through the mediation of the screen?

My daily newspaper yesterday carried a story about a decision by our state legislators not to extend the ban on texting while driving to drivers over the age of 21.

Texting while driving was banned for the younger set last August, and our solons evidently felt that this had taken care of the problem. The theory would be, I suppose, that by the age of 22 people have matured sufficiently to know that they shouldn’t be doing anything in the car that would distract them from the very serious business of controlling a ton or so of steel moving at high speed among other moving objects, some of which are people.

On Mother’s Day, we find ourselves thinking about the relationship that started it all; and about our need to honor the woman who helped to build our world, whether our mother is still with us, or if she has passed.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest partnership of all, and one which aids most in the replenishment of the world, is the relationship between mother and child.

One of the creators of “Second Life,” Cory Ondrejka, is fighting to give digital pioneers room and freedom to grow.

He wrote the following post for The Futurist magazine’s “2020 Visionaries” series, running in the magazine throughout 2010 and which we’re happy to highlight here at the Britannica Blog.

Everyone needs a better class of garbage, the matter of one of Jason Robards’s many exhortations in the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns. The film nicely bookends Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man, and not just as an antonym…

The assessment of public opinion is meant to produce a map of the opinions of an entire population by asking the opinions of some small sample.

Methods for selecting a sample that can plausibly be held to be representative of the whole are complex and yet far from foolproof. The analysis of results employs mathematical tools that yield probabilities, not certainties.

The construction of the questions to be asked is as much art as science and may, intentionally or not, embody presumptions or goals of the poller. Questions may even tap into unsuspected anomalies in the way different people react to certain words or ideas.

We all procrastinate once in a while, I imagine. It’s only those who do so habitually and to the detriment of themselves and others who give an otherwise innocent foible a reputation hardly better than outright vice.

I did not know, however, that there is an identifiable class of persons who put off, not irksome chores, but pleasures. But there is, as reported lately in the New York Times.

F-A-T.

For many, it is the most terrifying three-letter word in our language. You would think there are worse things that someone could be, but in our society, to be fat is to be a failure.

But there are many misconceptions about weight that we ignore at our peril …

Is the discourse about multitasking falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle?

Could it be that instead of a stark choice between the frantic pursuit of getting more done in less time at one extreme or demonizing multitasking at the other end of the spectrum that there is an as-yet undocumented literacy in the relatively unexplored middle?

We owe it to ourselves to consider this and not to close the door prematurely on new ways to use our mind’s best tools.

Multitasking—remember when that was something computers did? They were supposed to do it for our benefit, to make our lives easier, but somehow it hasn’t quite worked out that way. With fast computers, the Internet, and smart phones in our pockets, today we’re always tethered to The Network, and sometimes it seems we’re doing its bidding instead of it doing ours.

Next Monday we’ll begin a week-long forum on the subject of multitasking—what it’s doing to us and how we can cope with it—with Maggie Jackson, Nicholas Carr, Howard Rheingold, and Heather Gold. New media guru Michael Wesch will join in with comments throughout the week.

Your comments and insights are welcome, too.