What the Internet gives, the Internet takes.

There’s little question that the web has made our lives more productive. We can work at the office, at home or even on a park bench, so long as there’s good WiFi access. We can Skype or text someone instantly, rather than hoping someone picks up the phone or bothers to transcribe lengthy voice mails. If you need to look something up – say the population of the city of Astana, Kazakhstan – you don’t have to track it down in a library book but just ask Google (the answer is 708,000, by the way.) Like they say, the Internet puts the world at your fingers.

But all that instant global access may be coming at a price. If you can work anywhere, then you can work everywhere, and people are increasingly expecting exactly that. If you always have a smart phone at reach, you can never really turn the phone ringer off for an hour or two of peace. And knowing thousands of new facts is not the same thing as learning, or understanding what they all mean. Once you get a taste, it’s difficult to sip from the fire hose that is the web.

Which makes one wonder: if the Internet gives us freedom, does it take our time?