Are we all just information addicts, churning out bad Xeroxes of something we once saw or heard?
The Johnstones were information addicts, interested in everything in how Indians made stucco, what lime did to oat crops, how Persian prepositions worked.
People tweet not because they're technophiles or information addicts, but because they have something to say and are interested to hear from others who share their interests.
Information addicts would have the pleasure of surfing the web at warp speed.Six years on, the picture is very different.
Preternaturally adapted to the 21st-century psychological space created by cellphones and the Internet, he is, one might say, an information addict.
Yet the most desirable devices these days are those that also allow information addicts on the move to untether themselves from the desktop PC and communicate through the so-called "cloud".
With a growing number of Internet sites trolling public databases for financial facts, it has become increasingly easy in the last two years for information addicts like me to perform party tricks by announcing to our friends all kinds of delicious snippets that once were considered intimate, known mainly to brokers or people with enough time to drive to the courthouse to flip through musty files.
But even if you're just an information addict (which I also am), this could potentially be heaven for you.
Digg meanwhile, now incubated and being rebuilt by Betaworks, is an interesting one to watch in this space, as team members there describe themselves as "rabid information addicts" who also have relied on Google Reader in the past.
Google is continually skirting the line between inciting privacy wonks to decry Glass and demonstrating its appeal to the skydiver set; Pebble is making a case to information addicts, but has been slow to extoll the virtues of its smartwatch as a more versatile platform.
This is definitely the computer for the video producer who wants to be able to monitor output in real time while working on some raw video at the same time, or the information addict who feels they just aren't getting enough with the two or three displays that represent the maximum possible output with a MacBook Pro or iMac.
