Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Broadband detox

It will probably be a few days until my next posting–as I think I mentioned earlier, I’m off to visit my wife’s family (well, now mine as well) in Arizona.It will probably do no harm to be away from a warm laptop for a few days. Aside from what damage having a mildly radioactive device perched above my groin might be doing*, I think I’m starting to suffer some form of Internet-induced ADD. With the Internet always on, whenever a discussion or name on the radio or TV momentarily attracts my attention (“Oh, I forgot about him!”), in goes the relevant text string into Google. Once into the infinite matrix of hyperlinks, you can skip from page to page, superficially absorbing knowledge but in reality entering a zone of semi-etherized blankness. For hours.It’s only a matter of time before some canny lawyer begins crafting a class action on behalf of an addled group of surfers claiming that their ISP knowingly provided a service that damaged his clients’ brainstems. I’ll check in again once the withdrawal symptoms become too strong…*The following alarming quote is from goodhealthinfo.net: “The liquid-crystal display (LCD) in most laptop screens gives off much less radiation than desktop monitors. However, the hard drive may still be a problem, because, as Blake Levitt points out in Electromagnetic Fields, it rests “literally on the user�s lap at genital level.” Yikes.