Brad McCarty:

It wasn’t so very long ago that we were all looking for more ways to be connected online. With the rise of social media sites, this task was made more simple than ever before. I remember trading in my Treo 755 for a BlackBerry Curve because it had a better Web browser, by which I could more readily access what was happening on FriendFeed. When Twitter rolled around, I was subscribed to everyone that I followed by SMS. The world was a noisy place, and I loved every minute of it.

But as is often the case, there can indeed be too much of a good thing. I quickly found myself worn down from the constant updates, random banter and Foursquare checkins. Fast forward a few years, add Instagram, Vine, cross-posts from Facebook and just about everywhere else and suddenly the dull roar had become a full-blown riot.

And so, more than 150 years after Thoreau’s famous dismissal of the fetish for more information faster faster!, we find ourselves observing the latest in a spate of trend pieces averring that, even though his Klout score must have suuuucked, he might have had a point after all. That strange sound you heard was Nicholas Carr’s sudden erection thumping the bottom of his desk.