This is one of those "speak for yourself" articles. Meaning, it assumes that everybody has this problem. When they don't. And for those folks who do feel like they have this problem, well, they have a lot of options and control at their fingertips to fight against and probably make it go away, or at least reduce it. There have been times where I've felt overwhelmed or had a hunger for solitude and it's almost always possible to deal with it. There are knobs you can turn. Leave your cellphone at home. Stay away from Twitter or Facebook or web forums (like HN) for a day or a week. Check email only once a day rather than 20 times a day. Plan a weekend vacation, offline, someplace quiet. And so on.
You're criticizing a strawman. Nowhere in this article you'll find a claim that "everyone has this problem".
It just states pretty obvious facts about the combined effects of new streams of information (mail/rss feeds/twitter/facebook) and new means of accessing those streams (laptops, smartphones) which leads to a growing addiction to frequent checking those streams.
This is not a novel or controversial point. There've been many articles about this effect in the past and there will be many more in the future.
I can observe this addiction in myself, when I pull out my iPhone to check my Twitter during lunch with my coworkers. I can observe this addiction in my coworkers when I glance and their monitors when I pass by and see the browser opened on Facebook or Twitter. I can see that in people on the street, who walk looking at their iPhones or Droids. I can see that in people in cafes, drinking their lattes with a laptop lid open and browser set on YouTube. I can see that in people like myself, checking Hacker News several times a day.
There is a problem, it is widespread and there is no easy solution. That's all that article is saying.
