All-news channels, wire services and top-of-the-hour headlines may be the only fabric we have left holding us together as a nation, but that isn't reason enough to sacrifice your attention span to the incessant drone of traffic updates, murder trial play-by-play, political posturing, composites from the NYSE and NASDAQ, and a dozen sports scores you don't much care about. But we all pay attention anyway, because of the drama. An hour later, we will get an update on the new composite and the latest senatorial soundbite. Now the Dow is down, now the mayor is blasting the labor union. Each day becomes a real-life soap opera, with news-bits so brief that it is nearly impossible to learn anything substantial.

Skip them. Spend those five minutes each hour doing something more productive, like conducting one meaningful conversation. To be a well-informed citizen, spend some quality time each day reading more thorough news and news analysis. In the time you spend on 20 separate news updates on Bosnia or Newt Gingrich, you could read one comprehensive and infinitely more informative New Yorker article.

As you spend more and more time online, email quickly changes from being a stimulating novelty to a time-consuming burden, with dozens of messages to read and answer every day from colleagues, friends, family, newsgroup posts, and unsolicited sales pitches. "Email is an open duct into your central nervous system," suggests MIT's Michael Dertouzos. "It occupies the brain and reduces productivity."

Email's greatest virtue is also its biggest problem: it's cheap. The transaction cost is so low in terms of both money and effort that people find it all too easy to transmit messages and contact you. Many electronic glutizens have picked up the very bad habit of forwarding every entertaining nugget they receive -- jokes, urban myths, electronic chain letters, etc. - to everyone on their electronic address book.

For those of us who spend a fair amount of time working on a computer, maintaining control over our email in-boxes is critically important. If we're spending too much time each day reading and answering email that has virtually no value, we must take steps to control it. Ask people (nicely) not to indiscriminately forward trivia. "Unsubscribe" to the newsgroups that you're no longer really interested in. Tell spammers that you have no interest in their product, and ask them to remove you from their customer list.

How does one live a meaningful life in an ever-more complex and distracting world? One helpful ingredient, I've found, is embracing a new paradigm of simplicity -- a return to more fundamental, resonant technologies that George Mason University professor Hugh Heclo calls "downteching." Downteching is the conscious embrace of older, simpler machines. "In the long run," he says, "excesses of technology mean that the comparative advantage shifts from those with information glut to those with ordered knowledge, from those who can process vast amounts of throughput to those who can explain what is worth knowing and why."

In line with Heclo's observation, there is a growing movement in this country called "voluntary simplicity" (inspired by a book of that name by Duane Elgin), which is dedicated to the pursuit of a more sustainable, balanced life. "To live more simply is to live more purposefully and with a minimum of needless distraction," writes Elgin. Sympathetic magazines and radio shows have been cropping up, endorsing the notion that, without forsaking technology, we should make an effort to use the most basic technologies available that can get the job done -- preferably tools whose function anyone can plainly understand.

For example, I have discovered that there's something dreadfully distracting about my computer now that it has become a full-time communications tool and not just a word processor. The level of writing I aspire to cannot be formulated in front of a bank of television screens or with a electronic mailman announcing new e-mail every seven minutes. One solution I'm experimenting with is to do my serious writing on a separate machine, a much simpler machine that merely processes words. This device -- I'm trying out Apple's new e-mate300, sort of a mini-Powerbook designed for school kids -- cannot connect me with hundreds of millions of people and billions of pages of news and information. It's just an electronic notebook. It doesn't talk or play video or offer me hyperlinks to Austrailia. It just takes down my thoughts and helps me print them out if I want. With an internal battery that lasts 24 hours, this is the first machine I've used in a long time that truly allows me to "escape."

The government should help citizens defend themselves against data spam. Our quality of life is seriously hampered by unsolicited phone calls, faxes, mail and email. We have a right not to be harassed, and there is a very simple solution. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 made it illegal to use an auto-dialing phone machine or to make calls with a pre-recorded voice. This law should now be amended to address the problem of junk email by barring, among other things, software that automatically plucks email addresses from all over cyberspace and indiscriminately includes them in marketing solicitations.

Furthermore, this new legislation should establish on behalf of all consumers a national, mandatory "do-not-disturb" registry of names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses by which all mass-marketers would be legally obliged to abide. Current do-not-disturb lists are voluntary. How would you like to never get a sales call at dinner again? You could simply register your name and phone number on this one list. If you wish to keep your email box free of garbage, add it to the same list. Marketers would be required to cross-reference their lists with the national do-not-disturb list, and delete all matches before launching their sale barrages.

Lastly and most importantly, we need to overhaul the way we develop all technology policy. This would be a formidable challenge if it were not for the fact that a wonderful working model already exists right across the ocean. In 1987, the Danish parliament came upon a fix for the perennially anti-democratic nature of technology policy. Traditionally, because of technology's inherently complex nature, only technologists from the military, businesses and universities have been invited into the policy-making process. For democracies like Denmark and the U.S., this has frequently led to needless confusion and unrest. Nuclear power, bovine growth hormone, and food irradiation are just three of many instances where closed-door policy formulations have backfired after they were put into place. Not letting ordinary people confront the implications of policies until they are implemented is like deciding to bake an apple pie in order to find out if your friend is allergic to apples.

Inspired by the Danish model, the Massachusetts-based Loka Institute is spearheading an effort to persuade the U.S. to adopt the system of consensus conferences. It would establish a natural bridge between technologists, policymakers and ordinary citizens. In this system, a diverse group of citizens is recruited and promptly immersed in one particular issue facing congress (genetic testing, for example). The citizen panel contains no technical experts and no representatives from relevant interest groups. Panelists are supplied with necessary background material and asked to make specific policy recommendations on a pending matter of biotechnology or information technology.

After thorough deliberation, the panel convenes for a public forum in which the citizens hear testimony of experts and interest groups, cross-examine the experts, deliberate, and finally issue a report and conduct a press conference. The consensus conference represents precisely the kind of paradigm this nation must embrace in order to make citizen knowledge commensurate with the power of public opinion (as registered in polls). Above all else, it is imperative that in the coming years we strive to keep the quality of our thinking as substantial as the quantity of our information