So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.

That reminded me I hadn’t read “The Odyssey” since college. Because my interest lay specifically with the Sirens, I sifted through a variety of classicists’ interpretations of their role. Then—and this seemed reasonable enough—I searched for the “Sirens” episode in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” I can’t quite recollect how I got to the video for the song “Sirens,” by the alternative rock group AVA, but that put me in mind of Blink-182 (with whom AVA shares a frontman), so I clicked over to that band’s site to check for any updates. When I looked up, three and a half hours had passed.

And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an application called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique—writing at a cafe without Internet access—came undone when the place went wireless.

Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers.

But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality but with the promise of unending knowledge. That is precisely the draw of the Internet. It is heartening that the yearning for learning is the most powerful of all human cravings. Yet the sea surrounding the Sirens was littered with corpses. Can increased knowledge really destroy us?

Well, yes. According to Elster, there are certainly occasions when choosing ignorance could be smart.

The promise is of infinite knowledge, but what’s delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: Centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we’re inundated with data, our brains’ synthesising functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose—deeper knowledge of a subject—is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli. I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work—to my life—that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of “Waiting for Daisy,” a memoir
© 2009 The New York Times