The Daily News Online: "'The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me,' Richard Ford, the novelist, wrote six years ago.

"It has only gotten worse since then, complains David M. Levy, a victim of information overload who is also a computer scientist at the University of Washington's Information School.

"Levy is all but helpless, he says, when new e-mail arrives. He feels obliged to open it. He is similarly hooked on the news, images and nonsense that spill out of the Internet. He is also a receiver and sometimes a transmitter of 'surfer's voice,' the blanched prattling of someone on the phone while diddling around on the Web."