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Recently I bought a Nokia 9300i. Phone cock-swaggering aside, it allows me to be connected to the internet, permanently. I can ssh to my machines, I can look up facts on the internet and I can read without moving my eyes further than a few square centimeters of screen. This is nothing new, what is new is that I can now do this all the time. I can do it in the middle of speeches, in restaurants or on the toilet.
[geeking musings to follow]In science fiction writing there is a concept knows as The Singularity. It describes a point where our consciousness becomes digitised and out rate of technological advancement increases at the far right end of exponential. Writers such as Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow have been getting excited about this concept as a real possibility. Their books are infused with all the techno-web-slang the blogosphere has provided and many of their concepts mirror experiences I can map to the geeky realm. IRC karma being a direct translation of Doctorow's wuffie.
As I sat in a restaurant reading "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" on my phone, I started to feel this possibility. My digital life has always been fairly caught up in my real life, but now it feels a little more weaved into my cortex. After eventually closing the eBook app and getting into my car, I realised my brain hadn't switched back into "real life". It was idling in that semi-reactive state where digital life is the first cause and every thing else is a reaction. I jogged myself out of it and realised I didn't mind, not at all.