Even as download speeds get faster, the content is more and more of a drag.

Back in the days of dialup, when it took the better part of thirty seconds just to get online, I held things in my hands. There were tapes, plastic disks with music and movies on them. Things were slower back then, even as we hungered for more speed.

Now we hold nothing. A stream of bits flows through all our devices. Yet we’ve grown even more impatient. We’re downloading movies at 700 megabytes a pop that you can burn to a CD (remember those?). Wait, it should be high def – throw away that low res garbage. No, hold on, it has to be 3D high def. Stop the buffer. Just shoot the data straight into my optic nerve and we’ll call it entertainment.

These days, video delivery on the web is at one end of the spectrum and the puffed up 3D “special” show (not a movie, but an “experience”) is at the other. We’re pulling in two different directions: By day, downloading bitty eye trash that would blind a mole if it could see. By night, coughing up wads of cash and slapping on polarized lenses that guarantee entertainment epiphanies. Does one thing support the other? Sure it does.

Divergence is an illusion. Everything comes to the web that waits. The spiders crawling around the information are busy tying us up. They’re not really interested in us, though. It’s our information they want – and they need feeding.

Clicker is hungry, Google is ravenous, Bing wants to blow your dough – and it’s all for us, well, me. I’m the centre of the world and its wide web. My blog, the swamp of my thoughts, my LiveJournal, mostly dead because only, well, nobody visits, my Tweets (even if they’re Woofs), my info, all me all the time.

No human watches my data (sorry, reads my stuff), but the spiders crawling around are busy sucking the information life out of me and the rest of my demographic.

How can it be invasive if it’s free? Someone’s at the door offering free gifts if they can only come in and show us some carpet samples, vacuum cleaner demos, bigger sex organs, I.Q. tests, tooth whiteners, money from generous Nigerians.

At some point, front door pitches became click-through ads watched by Web 3.0 Shelob and her arachnid pals following our eyes and buys. We’re helping, too. Heck, if the sites didn’t have enough data to mine, we’d dig it out ourselves and smear it all over a Facebook wall or squeak it out in eight-word tweets.

But let me get back to the content. Sooner or later, I’m going to want some serious entertainment on my computer. I don’t have time for what Ed Sullivan would have called the Really Big Shew tonight. I consumed the expensive Avatar, as fresh, original, and delectable as a pop tart, and now I’m ready for speed and good times (free good times, I’ll add).

But we’re approaching limits set by our bodies. There are only so many thoughts worth having in a day, let alone a moment. Sure, we can blurt things out by the minute, but when we look (not far) back, we’ll see that they’re embarrassingly dull. Only now they’re out there for digital ever! Want to have kids? They’ll find you out; everything you said and showed you were and are.

On the biggest screen, the web, we’re spraying billions of lame megabytes at UsTube every day. Whether it’s video, strings of 140 characters, or yet another 29 unique pictures of us and the pals getting hammered at the local club (again), everyone is posing for their own cameras and looking just fab for Facebook. We’re the show.

Life on the web is disappointingly slow. But it’s not the fault of your server; the technology is working just fine. It’s slow because we’re the ones who make it dull. It takes time to make life intriguing. I’d tell you how, but I’m texting someone more interesting than you at the moment.