But it's different isn't it, it's compulsive and induces passivity like watching TV does, it doesn't permit you to think or imagine, it fills every vacuum imagination could flourish in. And it's omnipresent now, it isn't even a cordoned off experience (for those of us with smartphones).
Perhaps it's actually less boring (in terms of the extreme short term). Boredom is smothered by it. Not an original thought.
It's like a development of muzak that fills every space, liminal or otherwise. The usual dynamics are flattened, the peaks and troughs level out under the weight of constant information. It's numbing in the way that channel hopping is but much more enticing because you can always find something you're interested in.
I think David Foster Wallace's thing about boredom forcing people to confront a sort of low level, ambient pain rings true:
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly...but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.”