We should all allocate at least a day a week when we stop our incessant use of phonecalls, email and social networking. Then we can let our minds expand and our real-life connections grow

The best part of my late summer holiday was spent in the Lake District, where my pleasure in the unusual combination of fabulous weather and lack of people was surpassed only by my delight in the total absence of a mobile phone signal, either in the village where we stayed or on the tops of the loftiest mountains.

One of the worst days was passed walking in the ancient Yorkshire Wolds, where the sense of awesome quiet and history were marred by a friend's umbilical attachment to his new mobile device, which he had to consult for some apparently essential piece of information every time he put one foot in front of the other. A close second was the day I went to the races with another friend, who had to keep breaking off from having a good time to communicate to her Facebook friends what a good time she was having.

I don't think I'm a Luddite, but it seems that our ability to enjoy the moment, whether in a social or a work context, is under growing threat from our need to be constantly connected to not just the world and his wife, but their children, friends and business associates.

Why is it? Insecurity? Herd mentality? Novelty? Or, more insidiously, does it reflect a need for constant stimulus from multiple sources to satisfy brains conditioned by a proliferation of media, computer games and online information?

This is certainly a concern for Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. While the internet allows us to gather lots of information quickly, juggle tasks and exchange messages—often all at the same time—it gives us scant opportunity or encouragement to reflect on the meaning of all that information, or, as he puts it, "engage in solitary attentive ways of thinking".

In other words, being "always on" is affecting our concentration, leading to a superficiality that translates into our social and work environments. An additional danger is that people are so lost in their virtual worlds that they fail to connect in the real one. Does having 375 Facebook friends or 439 LinkedIn connections really make you happier or more successful, or do these things act as proxies for meaningful relationships and fulfilling jobs?

Forecasters such as Trajectory and the Future Foundation claim to have found no evidence of such pernicious effects. Rather, says James Murphy, editorial director of the Future Foundation, online networking has spawned a wealth of creativity, colour and expressiveness—some of it trivial, but some profoundly important, not least in helping to mitigate the effects of the recent recession, including redundancy.

Maybe, then, it is not the internet per se that is at fault: after all, it is only a tool, an enabler. It is the way we use it that needs challenging. I witnessed the ludicrous spectacle recently of four businessmen having lunch together yet talking almost continuously on their mobiles—whether to other people or each other, I don't know. Just as technology "doesn't make you less stupid, it just makes you stupid faster", as someone once said, perhaps it makes stupidity more obvious too.

My 17-year-old niece isn't stupid. She recently achieved spectacular exam results, despite doing most of her revision sprawled on the sitting-room floor surrounded by the noisy comings and goings of her large family, and with Facebook and mobile in constant attendance. She juggled her studying with a part-time job and a hectic social life. If that's what one of Carr's "rewired" brains looks like, then it's not all bad.

My niece and her ilk will be real assets to modern organisations, with their need for flexible, adaptable multi-taskers who are technology-savvy, well connected and can find information fast. And the fact that young "wired" employees are "always on" works in employers' favour too, particularly in the increasingly competitive global economy.

But firms need other things too—not just the lazy reproduction of existing ideas, which may be efficient, but is not always effective. If they are to differentiate themselves from the crowd, they also need original thinking. And conceiving, marinating, developing and validating ideas requires uninvaded time and space. The more wired you are, the less likely you are to have such space.

Maybe we should create a new secular Sabbath. A day of rest from technology, when we all vow not to log on. People often say they have their best ideas away from the office, but these days the office isn't so much a physical place as a mentality. You have to switch off a few devices to really get away.