At the Speed of Thought

I've been watching the Ghost in the Shell series as of late and it has me wondering how some of the technology on display in the series would actually work in real life. What interests me the most is the idea of thought-driven net use. While the idea of using the interior of one's eyes or even hacking into the visual cortex of the brain itself is interesting enough, it's the idea of one's thoughts controlling everything from conversations to searches to what is displayed that fascinates me. For a mind like mine that, if one were to describe it, would look like a rabid squirrel in the park periodically falling into an epileptic seizure, a thought-driven net would have a hard time keeping up or even knowing what to do in the first place. This is what interests me about a thought-driven net. How does this kind of interface know when you are talking, when you are searching, when you are reading and when you are doing all three at once? Would every errant thought turn into a search or even cause one to call that person? Would every daydream become a rabbithole of information? And what of the servers and routers that hold all of this information once it does become a search or a conversation? When your thoughts themselves create an electronic paper trail is there the possibility of privacy? What happens to our sense of self?
A corollary question to this is how does a thought-driven net change the way we think? Given that we would necessarily have to change how we think in order to use a thought-driven net, what changes would we have to make? What commands would we need to access the net and how would those commands affect our conscious thoughts? How would we shape what we think about when we are both on the net and off?
It's a lot of questions with few answers at the moment. I don't know, I like the idea of a thought-driven net but I wonder about its effects on consciousness and identity.