????這個月我斷了網——徹底斷掉了。我關掉了iPhone，設置了假期自動回復郵件，開始了為期兩周的度假生活。假期第二天，我就不再條件反射似地去摸手機了。一周以后，我一次能連續讀書一個多小時了。但是一回到家中，我又得面對讓人清醒的現實：收件箱里塞著1,379封未讀郵件。

????而這還只是工作郵件而已。

????我的重要性并不像未讀郵件數字顯示的那么高，我也不是唯一一個遇到過這種情況的人，很有可能你也為此頭疼不已，而且這個問題似乎愈演愈烈了。以前，人們在暑假旅游時通常只是偶爾查收一下郵件，今年卻開始流行“數字休假”（digital sabbatical，社交媒體研究者丹納?博伊德甚至就這個話題寫了一篇攻略）。就像一位朋友在外出自動回復郵件中所寫的：“我將于8月5日至20日暫停連接互聯網，在此期間不會回復郵件。”就連偶爾查收郵件都取消了——今年夏天我們需要一個真正的假期！

????然而，這種潮流并不是要大張旗鼓地反對電郵。電郵是個神奇的發明，它能讓人們充分、免費地溝通。想想看，在不到一個世紀的時間里，人類實現了何等巨大的跨越：1915年（我祖父出生那年），亞歷山大?格雷厄姆?貝爾在紐約撥通了打往舊金山的電話，這是首個橫貫美國大陸的電話，當時這個3分鐘的通話價格根據通脹率調整后高達440美元。而今天，我能通過Gmail的賬戶與遠在布達佩斯和東京的朋友進行視頻通話——而且完全免費。真是太神奇了。

????這不只是一通電話，更是對創新的呼喚。關于電話的這一歷史細節來自喬恩?加特納的新書《創意工廠：貝爾實驗室和美國創新大時代》（The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation），這無疑是我在2012年讀到的最重要的著作。加特納認為，通訊是美國經濟在20世紀遭遇的最大挑戰，為此他生動地描繪了貝爾實驗室率先開發的創新方案。

????敏銳的讀者在有關貝爾實驗室崛起的歷史記述中不難發現很多如今似曾相識的創新要素：背景各異卻充分協作的團隊，用來研發個人興趣項目的自由工作時間等，這些做法現在早已被硅谷最富創新能力的公司奉為圭臬。而掩卷之后讓我深思數月的問題出現在最后一章——加特納問道：“便捷的信息通道是不是不僅擴展了我們的生活范圍，同時也給我們的生活帶來了大量的限制？”

????簡而言之，為了解決一個問題，上個世紀的頂尖技術專家們制造出一堆新的問題。其中當然就有基本的安全隱患。信息時代的典型特征是數據可以迅速、便宜地進行交換，這為黑客和網絡恐怖分子提供了很多侵犯隱私的可乘之機，自稱為無名氏的活躍黑客紛紛崛起。

????還有就是電子郵件泛濫之殤。不斷出現的新工具能幫助我了解我關心的重要信息，更高效地消化更多信息。但與此同時，絕大多數這類工具也讓電郵泛濫的問題進一步惡化。

????社交網絡就是個絕佳的例子。很多社交網絡試圖讓用戶在社交情境中開展溝通，從而自然地過濾掉那些不太重要的信息。然而，我們周遭的世界尚未齊刷刷地拋棄電郵，轉投社交網絡的懷抱，一如我們曾經拋棄固話、改用手機那樣。除非一種通訊工具被所有人采納并成為文化規范，否則它就毫無用處，因為使用者不確信對方到底能不能接收到自己的信息。正因為如此，社交網絡更像是娛樂雜志的電子版，而其推送電郵——比如什么“馬特?維拉正在Kickstarter（美國創意籌資網站——譯注）上關注你”，“埃文?亨佩爾希望你加入他在商務社交網站LinkedIn上的圈子”之類——只會讓垃圾電郵愈發泛濫。

????難道是我們的終極目標錯了嗎？畢竟大多說這類服務的宗旨是幫我們消化來自更多人、有關更多話題的更大量信息。二十年前，英國人類學家羅賓?頓巴在研究了猴群內部的社會關系，并比照大腦尺寸繪制了這些信息后得出了一個理論，人類實際能掌控的交際人數最多只有150人。如果和硅谷的創業家聊起這個話題，他們往往會向你展示他們的服務能如何幫助你超越這個所謂的“頓巴數”，也就是幫你掌控大大超過150人的交往人數。這個目標正確嗎？或者，我們是不是應該把精力放在如何限制溝通，轉而培養并加深入、更少數量的人際關系上呢？

????對于信息爆炸導致的這些問題我難以解答（我連收件箱里1,379封郵件都沒法讀完，怎么可能有時間思考這個問題呢？），但是本世紀圍繞通訊進行的創新絕大多數似乎都增加了通訊的手段，它們放大了20世紀所取得的最偉大的成就，使信息量更加豐富，但卻并不更有益處。

????我覺得，一個信息量超載不可承受之重的時刻即將來臨。我們身邊都有那么一些人拒絕使用Facebook，很少在網絡上拋頭露面，也不依賴大家都在用的社交平臺，但我們絕大多數人都不會這么不隨大流。我們過于害怕自己會錯過一些重要的東西。于是我們給自己放個“數字休假”，希望某個地方的某個人突然會想出個絕妙的主意，解決21世紀最重大的信息難題。

????譯者：清遠

????This month I went off the grid -- all the way off. I powered my iPhone down, popped the vacation responder on my email, and headed out for a two-week adventure. By day two, I had stopped reflexively reaching for my phone; after a week, I could read a book for more than an hour at a time. Then I came home to a sobering reality: 1,379 messages in my Inbox.

????And that was just work email.

????I'm not as important as my voluminous Inbox would have you believe me to be, nor am I all that unique. Chances are you have this problem, too. And it seems to be getting a lot worse. Unlike past years, when people checked in occasionally from summer vacation destinations, this year digital sabbaticals were in vogue. (Social media researcher Danah Boyd even published a "how-to" on the topic.) As one friend's "away" message read: "I'm unplugged from 8/5-8/20. I won't be responding to e-mail." None of this occasional checking in -- this summer we needed a real break.

????But this is not another rant against email. Email is magic. It enables abundant, free communication. Consider how far we have come in less than a century: In 1915 -- the year my grandfather was born -- Alexander Graham Bell picked up a telephone in New York and made the country's first transcontinental call to San Francisco. Adjusting for inflation, the price of a 3-minute call back then was $440. Today, I video chat through my Gmail account with friends in Budapest or Tokyo -- for free. Seriously, magic.

????Rather, this is a call for innovation. This detail about the telephone came from Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, which was easily the most important book I read in 2012. Gertner identifies communications as the largest challenge the American economy had to confront in the 20th century, and he vividly describes the formula for innovation that Bell Labs pioneered.

????In his historical account of the rise of Bell Labs, a discerning reader will recognize many of the elements -- collaborative heterogeneous teams, free time to work on personal projects -- that have become staples in Silicon Valley's most innovative companies. But the thought I'm left contemplating months after completing the book is raised in the final chapter: "Has access to information not only expanded our lives, but contracted them?" Gertner asks.

????Put simply, in the race to solve one problem, the last century's greatest technologists created a host of new ones. There are, of course, basic security concerns. The information age -- in particular, the quick and inexpensive exchange of data -- presents opportunities for the violation of privacy and exposes societies to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and cyberterrorists. Witness the rise of the group of activist-hackers who call themselves Anonymous.

????And then there's the problem of my email box. New tools are constantly being invented to help me to see the information that matters to me, and to digest more information more efficiently. But so far, most of those tools make this particular problem worse.

????Social networks are a perfect example. Many have attempted to lend social context to communication, helping us naturally to filter out what is less important. But our culture has not yet abandoned emails en masse for social networks in the way that we abandoned landlines, for example, in favor of cell phones. Unless a communications tool is adopted by everyone, becoming the cultural norm, it is useless because users can't trust their messages will be received. Thus social networks feel more like the digital versions of entertainment magazines and their email prompts -- "Matt Vella is following you on Kickstarter" and "Evan Hempel wants you to join his network on LinkedIn" -- add to the email problem.

????Could it be that our end goal is wrong? Most of these services are focused on helping us digest more -- more information on more topics coming from more people. Two decades ago British anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the social connections in groups of monkeys and mapped this information to brain size to come up with a theory that the maximum number of relationships a human being can realistically manage is 150. Talk to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and they'll often demonstrate how their services can help you game "the Dunbar number," as it is called, nursing far more than 150 relationships. Is this the right objective? Or should we instead be focusing on how to limit communication, to nurture and deepen a smaller number of relationships?

????I don't have an answer for the problems that information presents (how could I possibly have time to think about it when I haven't yet been able to get through the 1,379 emails in my Inbox?), but it seems that most of the innovation around communications in this century has been of the incremental variety. It has amplified the greatest achievements of the 20th century, making information more abundant but not more useful.

????I sense we are reaching a moment of maximum overload. We all know people who are Facebook refusers, who keep low digital profiles and aren't reliable on the common platforms, but most of us would never bow out entirely. We're too afraid we'd miss something important. Instead, we arrange to take our digital sabbaticals in hopes that for someone, somewhere, a big idea—the solution to the 21st century's biggest information problem--will emerge.