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:
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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.
Article comments
1 - mike
oh my... this is so right on...
Silence.
wow...
--mj
2 - heruka
This is great! My wife and I have both been showing symptoms of IS meltdown and I recalled the meme from a novel I'd read years ago, but I couldn't recall the title. "Easy Travel to Other Planets"--a good read, if it's still in print. Information Sickness is a real malady and manifests as a perceived need to monitor every snippet of news, while simultaneously stifling an impulse to vomit.
3 - samantha
i thought that that was inspirational.