You can always count on our Young Voices to be on top of an issue, or ahead of it. Witness the contribution on Thursday by Alyssa Villmann of Jefferson High School.

She was reporting on blogs, the countless avenues people can use to express themselves online. Fittingly, she quoted the most pertinent sentence of the 21st century so far: "Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few."

In other words, there is an incredible amount of noise. So much so that it gets harder all the time to tell when information is at hand.

This has been obvious for a while, and it may explain why so much of the world no longer seems to work the way it should. Everybody is busy communicating. Which means that there is hardly any time to learn something or get something tangible done.

At the paper we contribute to the trend. We have our online comment strings, some of which go on and on with point and counterpoint, except that often the commenters are mistaken, or misinformed, or have misread something, or don't quite remember something the way it really was.

But they do all have an opinion, to the point where sometimes it seems "opinion" has become a dirty word. (Maybe we should change the label of this page.)

We should just admit it: There is way too much opinionated communication in the world today. And are we better off? Hardly.

What's to blame for all this? Technology, no doubt about it.

One example: There's agitation to legislate a ban on using cell phones while driving. It's supposed to be dangerous, and maybe it is. But the danger would not exist if cell phones did not exist.

When you think about it, there is no real compelling reason for cell phones. But building them created a desire to have them. So now we have people chattering away when they should be paying attention to the road.

Except for the occasional vehicle breakdown on a lonely stretch of highway, cell phones have no use other than to increase the amount of chatter.

In the days when we had to find a pay phone to reach anybody from the road, most of us kept our idle thoughts to ourselves, and the world was better off.

Then there's e-mail. At the editor's desk here, the occasional useful e-mail is easy to miss among the steady stream of daily chaff.

If you can't cull the queues of e-mails at least three or four times a day, they build up to an astonishing length - to the point where you wish the computer would just blow up.

But alas, no explosions occur, and you go back to deleting messages, and then having to clear out the deleted files lest the system choke up and break down. Wait … Break down?

This is the moment when the light blinks on.

Adding to the surfeit of communication, you're invited to check out D-H Today, the editor's weekday morning video at democratherald.com.