Do we need to be connected to a grid 24/7/365? As much as we celebrate the ability to work from Starbucks, or telecommute from our living room, there are times when we need a bit of space, offline, to free our minds from so much information streaming in.

I have this discipline, where for one day of the week I do not listen to the news in the car or read a newspaper, or check the headlines on landing pages. I call this ‘information purge day.’ So I was glad to see this from Adam Bosworth of Google, who puts this in the context of travel:

Lufthansa has announced that it will support internet on planes. I will not fly on them. I need some periods in my life where I am unreachable. Indeed, every year in August, I vanish for a month from the web, turn off email, and deal with the withdrawal and suddenly I relearn how to think and concentrate. In a world where knowledge and thinking is everything, it is ironic that increasing availability had led to decreasing time in which to reflect, ponder, and just let the mind wander and yet these periods tend to be essential to truly thinking hard.

Truly thinking hard. That’s something of a luxury to many. An airplane is one of those places where you are supposed to be sealed in. Cellphones and Blackberries have punctured that space, so with in-flight Wi-Fi, the cabin-as-sanctuary is not going to last. Bosworth is going to have to dump a lot of planes.