I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works

When you compulsively check e-mail, or run to the mailbox, or open up Facebook, she says, you aren’t simply being obsessive or trying to avoid work. You’ve succumbed to something much deeper. Stone calls this “continuous partial attention”: a need to know what’s coming next, an “effort not to miss anything.”

Behind the worries is a strange assumption that language is fixed and unchanging,