Traffic jams on the information superhighway.

My friend Mary and I, (failing to find Eastgate's movie theater with three minutes before our showing of Harry Potter was due to start and ending up hauling our asses all the way to Point for a slightly later showing), discuss relationships, the meaning of happiness, the massive Internet explosion of our generation and our own personal failures in filtering all the information, tools, and various experiments underway all over the world.

It's true. The internet sometimes gives me a headache, when I think of all that is possible and how little I'm really utilizing that, and how much time and energy I could spend in creating an organized corner of cyberspace. I have three blogs (of one type or another), a very dusty Twitter account, a Facebook account, and - now that I've discovered some of the more social features like chat and GReader's content-sharing - an increasingly interactive Google account. I have a long way to go before I am using these tools to their full potentials, and I can't help feeling that my "informational" life is as much of a mess as my physical apartment, right now, minus dirty laundry.

And then there's information intake. I love to learn, and I'm interested in almost everything - it's part of why I went into journalism. But if I don't set clear goals for a period of time, I fall easily into the dread hyperlink tangent, the internet equivalent of forgetting why you walked into a room.

And choice overload. The list of subjects I want to investigate further grows faster than I get through it, and when it comes to picking where to start, I generally get little help from Google's deceptively simple search page. "Hello, Christie," it says. "I have 250 billion brains. My goal is to one day contain all of human knowledge. What did you accomplish today?"

I guess it's a matter of discipline, to some degree. Of learning to selectively filter out all the billions of pieces of data waving their arms and screaming at you - at least until you've finished the task you've set for yourself and can resume "aimless browsing time." But then again, is any research task ever truly complete? There are always finer details and larger implications to investigate. A 20 inch story almost always has the potential to lead to an entire novel. Not always an interesting one, but a novel nonetheless.

I suspect that, while there are many people out there who are using the internet thoroughly and well, it's the younger generation that's going to do it best. After all, they're growing up in a world of interconnections and information overload that I only started with, one very slow pageload at a time, in 5th grade. By then, the brain is already developing the intractable rind of mental habit. In theory (my theory, my completely unscientific theory), the kids who are growing up with modems in their cradles are going to be so used to the barrage of information by the time they can read that they'll know exactly how to filter out what they don't need or want.

And while it's my mission as a journalist to become a master of finding, organizing, and presenting fact from all formats and sources, I doubt I will ever be able to look at Google's search box without feeling at least a small temptation to shut down entirely in the face of so much choice.