The connection between the two actually goes to the heart of my book. The key for me wasn’t just seeing the obvious — that people are over-extended and scattered. It was noticing what people are extended and scattered in.

So many of us are immersed in an on-line social environment in which everything is fragmented, abbreviated and abstracted. It allows us to get more things done a whole lot faster all right, but at the cost of disconnect – not just from ourselves but the larger picture of whole social activities like health care, social work and public education.

The middle section of the book is called Attention Deficit Culture, because I chart the effect of all this fragmentation and abstraction, and the shift from face-to-face realities to an on-line symbol realm of reality in our key social institutions. I document how people’s attention does begin to switch from the realities of sick and needy people in front of them to the bit-tasks and data sets on the screen. Partly because that’s what counts for accountability, and also because they haven’t got time to take on the full reality these tasks and data sets are part of or represent so they just focus on the bit-task, getting the report in on time or whatever. This is where the stressed institution comes in, and the toll this is taking as people are neglected and reality abandoned.

More worrisome still, I see evidence that as a society we’re losing the capacity to engage in that kind of consensus building, and that kind of dialogue based on people’s informed intuition and common sense is falling silent. Part of the Walkerton tainted water tragedy was that when the experts’ knowledge failed the people of Walkerton, they weren’t able to fall back on their own common sense and shared experience and take corrective action. It’s a serious problem.

The key to me is identification: the ability to know that the earth is us and all our relations as the First Nations put it. Not just to know this, but to feel it in our bodies and souls. Similarly here, I have amassed a lot of hard research evidence on the huge numbers of people who keep pushing themselves past the warning signs of fatigue and burnout, who go until they collapse, who ignore their children, their partners and friends because all they can see and identify with is the numbers on the screen.

More public discussion of this as a social not a personal issue will help, and certainly that is necessary. More effort spent connecting the dots between over-extended parents and children who aren’t growing up school ready, and between too much fragmentation and contracting out and a diminishing sense of an institutional ethos and integrity – this would help too. Or perhaps this over-inflated, over-extended symbol-based new economy will, like the eCommerce bubble of the late 1990s simply implode one day, and as a society we’ll be forced to rethink our priorities. I’d like to think that change can come about less dramatically: as an accretion of individual, group and institutional decisions to shift priorities back to what makes us human rather than what makes us faster and more competitive.