What do we do once we are all fully connected? What then? The last few years have been a manic, oh-so manic push to hook our lives together electronically. All the Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters are happily intertwining themselves into our day-to-day lives.

We’re doing that thing again that we do. You know the thing I mean, when we go collectively berserk about something new and shiny without the first clue of how it will turn out. I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea, ’cause Columbus, Lewis & Clark, and even the Contintental Congress couldn’t have known what sort monsters they were helping make. Clearly there can be an intrinsic value to leaping without looking.

Once again, my question is simple: what’ll we do once there’s nothing more to connect? As I peruse Mashable.com, the web’s current most-popular social media news source, I see a neverending stream of articles touting new variants on an old theme. Nobody’s creating anything, really. We’ve become masters of derivation.

Everything is being created for the purpose of aggregation, gathering, harvest, and dissemination. We don’t seem to forge much anymore. I wonder how many books, plays, paintings, albums, and engineering marvels have been left unrealized, delayed, or simply preempted by a burning desire to fart around on Facebook at work? We’re spending an awful lot of time being mesmerized by connection.

Even in today’s era, innovators almost always have found a way to escape, to quiet the chaos to focus on a new invention, idea, or process. Clearly, there’s an intrinsic value in closing your door.

Finite worlds yield finite things. Specific amounts of oil. Exact numbers of humans. A determined number of Twitter followers. The specificity tells us how we’re doing, and where we’re going. I want to see more; connection means little without purpose.

It’s a season of harvest for the web kings, the unseen corps of social weavers who are tying us together in a series of electronic knots. To what end, I say? Are we ready to move on once we’ve all posted our posts and filled out our profiles and uploaded those photos?

I’m just saying, I’ve never noticed a moment for in need of Columbuses, Lewis & Clarks, and Continental Congresses.