Perhaps some pehnomena, especially those related to computer interaction, is due to something that  could be called information hunger. Surfing the web for instance, which can certainly be a healthy thing in terms of education, may also be detrimental, but in either case it may be caused some internal mechanism that craves information. This may also lead to channel-surfing; for some reason, a flat pattern of knowldge lacking depth, across several plateaus, is more useful than a deep knowledge in a single thing. This makes sense when one considers our stone-age neural equipment - a hunter-gatherer focused on weather, enemies, location of family, location of other dangers would be more advantageous than someone who used the same attention and resources to know every single detail of a banana tree.