passive conduits

I was driving home today on the freeway, noticing all the people around me talking on their cell phones. I wondered how many conversations were being beamed through my skull at any given moment–10? 100? Just streaming through, little packets of people’s lives, diced up into electronic squirming coils, passing through my cortex, my medulla oblongata, my heart, my liver. And me, blissfully unaware, listening to the sound of the road and a trillion molecules of air getting shoved aside by a thousand cars. And as I sit here typing this? How many? How many wifi packets of porn sites that the neighbors are browsing at this moment? Where precisely through me will the new york times front page headline burrow? I can almost feel the sensation of being saturated by information, constantly awash in it, even when I sleep. We are all being slowly microwaved.