Jon Mitchell (who wrote a nice piece on Digital Detox) on “How to Train Your Internet Friends:”

The problem here at the dawn of the Information Age is not that we have too much technology. It’s that we’ve trained each other to use it badly. If we want better communication, the first thing we have to do is communicate better….

By being so responsive, I am training my friends and colleagues to think that I’m constantly available…. By creating the expectation that we’re always available, the people in our networks learn to treat us as though we are. We get more messages with more urgency, and we get buried underneath them. We need to un-train our friends.