For as much as people laud the dawning of the Internet, all the clamor really amounts to much ado about nothing.

In my opinion, the “Information Superhighway,” as it’s affectionately called, is nothing more than a faster, more obnoxious, and infinitely more intrusive way of saying that which can be said in a myriad of other ways, or better, isn’t necessary to say at all.

I guess that gives some people a license to call me a quasi-Ludditte, a kook-philosopher, or whatever else they can come up with. Frankly, I don’t care to hear it unless you can insult me — well . . .

The Internet indeed manifests itself as an information superhighway.

At the same time, however, if we were to sketch a map of where it’s going, we’d discover a dead end, a road that doesn’t go anywhere but straight into the ground of our own over-inflated egos. It’s an expressway constructed around our own social insecurities.

The most common misunderstanding of the Internet is that it increases the quality of communication between people.

Surely from a certain, narrow standpoint this is true. But if one were to analyze this further, they’d discover that it’s nothing more than shallow thinking.

The Internet’s success is by and large based on social withdrawal, and not increased quality of communication.

If anything, its popularity is a sign of how far from a Skinnerian utopia we are, mere ghosts, silhouettes of the social beings we purport to be.

The supposed boon of the Internet domain is that it allows us to conduct commerce and correspondence automata, on our own schedule.

Pretty convenient? Yes, but only in the sense that it increases the quantifiable volume of communication.

On the other hand, any medium which actively encourages its participants to degrade their language into abbreviation, broken-speech and pathetic half-thoughts, is one which is suspect, and a potential step backwards in terms of communicative quality.

While we may be able to communicate faster, and more frequently, we must bear in mind that the mere substance of what we communicate is getting simpler. More base.

Out of this simplicity comes the primary motivation of on-line services — money.

It’s not about bettering humanity. It’s not about freeing-up long entombed information. It’s about how to cram more and more advertising into less and less space; how to ram this space into the consumers computer, into their home, into their face, leaving them not overwhelmed, but punch-drunk.

Seriously, from my perspective, corporate white noise is filling in all the negative spaces. And it’s an ugly scene.

When all is said and done about on-line services, what is the big deal?

As if we couldn’t communicate in other ways. As if the products that are being advertised over the Internet couldn’t be sold other ways. As if the information being dumped onto the World Wide Void can’t be obtained elsewhere. Where is the boon?

The computer has made its users impatient like no other machine, and the information on those very machines have made us all very much the same, sucked of our worthwhile creativity.

The Internet and its assorted wares have afforded its users a faster way to access a whole new brand of nothing.

The average Internet user sends the same people the same fragmented messages. They don’t summarize days, they break them into pieces. They “get communication over with,” and return to their troll-like slumber. They gain immediate gratification. They talk without watching their lips move. They experience short-attention-span flattery and electronic bliss.

Or, from my perspective, electronic hell. It’s a small splinter of social decadence shoved far underneath my fingernail. But maybe that’s just me.

Three years and 10,000 messages after beginning my journey on the Information Superhighway, I’m ready to slash the tires, drain the oil and put sugar in the gas tank.

Excuse me for wishing for a handwritten postcard instead of e-mail farmed out of fingertips too lazy to pick up a pen and scrawl something a little more genuine.

Feel free to “surf the highway” (or whatever the hell some out-of-touch, geek of a feature writer is calling it today), but don’t forget to pull over to the beach of reality every once in a while.

If not, someday you might be the pivotal bad cog in society’s overheating engine. Don’t let the highway run you over. Keep yourself in check and don’t eat what they feed you.

David Ptak has a B.A. in philosophy from Iowa State University and hails from Long Island, New York.