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Digital note-taking apps also leave their users only a finger-swipe away from e-mail or Candy Crush. An article on digital distraction in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review cites an estimate, by the Information Overload Research Group, that the problem is costing the U.S. economy nine hundred and ninety-seven billion dollars a year. “The digital world provides a lot of opportunity to waste a lot of time,” Allen said. A paper notebook, by contrast, is a walled garden, free from detours (except doodling), and requiring no learning curve. A growing body of research supports the idea that taking notes works better on paper than on laptops, in terms of comprehension, memorization, and other cognitive benefits.

“Rare” is such an quizzical descriptor, a blatant contradiction of the very nature of digital culture. Rarity describes a state of scarcity, and as we enter a proto-post-scarcity economy, digital stuff defies such shortages.Things are no longer rare; they are either popular or unpopular.Rarity itself has become very rare.

The digital age is also raising broader philosophical questions about memory. How much do we need to remember when it can be effortlessly recalled for us by a machine? If the use of search engines for retrieving facts is allowed at some point in the future, exams themselves might have to change.

Data specialist EMC estimates that in 2013 the world contained about 4.4 zettabytes (4.4 trillion gigabytes) of data. By 2020, it expects this to have risen tenfold.History, in other words, has gone online. While this means unprecedented instant access to vast stores of human knowledge and culture, it also means that mountains of digital data of crucial importance to archivists and future historians are potentially under threat from deletion, corruption, theft, obsolescence and natural or man-made disasters.

Ngram Viewer

What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though she’d know how to swipe once she did.

But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone No. 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone No. 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person. It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive.

The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age