Every day I get dozens of press releases hyping up products, and some of them really are products worth hyping.

But for every “real” product there’s a new application, or a new widget, or an add-on, or news about something else you can do on a bleedin’ social networking site or yet another improvement to Google.

The problem with all this is that we’re not all just waiting anxiously in front of our computer screens for some great (or maybe preposterous or more likely purposeless) new idea someone just has to inflict on us.

I’m not saying that all these widgets are useless, just that there’s too much of everything in abundance and someone should JUST CALL A STOP TO IT FOR AN HOUR, OR A DAY, OR A WEEK.

If this sounds like old-fashioned technophobia (texism?) then just hold that thought. I love the thing they once called the world wide web, and couldn’t imagine the world without it, but I also kind of liked living in a world in which you didn’t feel like you were in constant catchup with; a world where you could do something real and concentrated like, for instance, picking up a book and reading it all the way through, and soaking up lots of ideas but in a way that made sense to the brain.

We’ve now got random, mostly unwanted information rammed down our throats 24/7 and I’m starting to wonder whether the net result will be a world that, in 20 or 30 years time, will be infested with some kind of alzheimers’-like brain disease.

I read somewhere recently that the constant breaking of concentration in the workplace has been proven to cause alzheimers, and I’m not surprised. The ability to concentrate on the task at hand is one of the miracles of the human brain, but this is being challenged by current technology, where we feel deprived and lonely if we haven’t received a new Tweet in the last five minutes.

This week Google announced that it had yet another cool function: a way to quickly and effectively search for movies, venues and film session times in your town. Hell, it will even pop up a map (which you can then print out) to guide you to the nearest or best film theatre. That’s pretty useful, and probably really easy to use, but so many of these things aren’t, and let’s face it, most of us are just grimly groping around in the dark trying to utilise the core functions of the technology we use day by day, and we’ve really got enough on our plates and enough impositions on our already busy lives without the opportunity to improve our lives with yet another technology enhancement that will take an hour to learn and most likely never be used again. GARY STEEL