Ted Mooney coined this wonderful term back in 1981, long before the internet and the rise of the virtual, never-off, alway-connected world, in his equally wonderful, bizarre first novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets.

Mooney is a genius with titles: others are Traffic and Laughter and Singing Into The Piano.

Easy Travel to Other Planets is impossible to describe other than that it is quirky, original, and gives the best description I've ever read of what it might be like - both physically and emotionally - to have sex with a dolphin.

Don't scoff until you've tried it.

Blaine Harden wrote a most informative story on the increasing and ever-more embracing attraction of the virtual world. It appeared in Monday's Washington Post. Here it is:
________________________________________

Unplugging the Addiction To Information Overload

"The pace of life feels morally dangerous to me," Richard Ford, the novelist, wrote six years ago.

It has only gotten worse since then, complains David M. Levy, a victim of information overload who is also a computer scientist at the University of Washington's Information School.

Levy is all but helpless, he says, when new e-mail arrives. He feels obliged to open it. He is similarly hooked on the news, images and nonsense that spill out of the Internet. He is also a receiver and sometimes a transmitter of "surfer's voice," the blanched prattling of someone on the phone while diddling around on the Web.

"We are living lives of Web fragments," he said. "We don't remember that it is part of our birthright as human beings to have space and silence for our thoughts."

Levy is fed up and starting Monday night — with the help of cardiologists, monks, storytellers, hypertext editors, Zen masters and a choir — he is doing something about it. He has organized a conference here called "Information, Silence and Sanctuary," which will diagnose and prescribe treatment for what is ailing Levy — and, in his view, most of the developed world.

Information-polluted people need to organize and protect psychic space and quiet time, Levy believes, much as environmentalists organized in the 1960s to protect wetlands and old-growth forests.

Then, there was DDT, which did a marvelous job of killing mosquitoes — and much else in the natural world.

Now, there are home media centers, multi-tasking devices that allow people to sit in their living rooms, watch television, burn CDs, surf the Web and instant message.

At the office, according to a Wall Street Journal report on research carried out at the University of California at Irvine, workers flutter from spreadsheet to e-mail to Internet to phone about once every three minutes.

This week's conference seems likely to prescribe info-overload treatment that is similar to what Levy has prescribed for his own life.

"For me, one day a week is unplugged," said Levy, who has a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and who, before moving to Seattle three years ago, was a researcher for 15 years at the Palo Alto Research Center. That is where researchers invented the personal computer, the mouse and much of the technology that Levy now frets about. "We had seen the future and it was us," he has written about his years there.