Turning off: Light pollution and net noise

When I was younger, I had the fervent desire to be a star-gazer. I spent a lot of time looking at what stars that could be seen over the suburnan sky, trying to transform the sparse speckled field into the jewel studded magnificance that guided sailors across the Aegean and could sometimes keep great poets from getting drunk.

I did learn to recognize Orion.

Then I discovered that it was not a lack in my spirit or flaw in my vision that left me straining to be moved. The true culprit emerged: Light Pollution.

Light pollution exerted a strange facination over me. I grew to like dark shadows contrasting with a full moon's light. When I moved to Chapel Hill, the bane of my night time walking were the sweeping landing light of the local micro-airfield and the skyward spotlights of some far off used auto park. The general, diffuse increase in glow was bad enough, but these moving beams constantly caught my attention until I could no longer bear to be outside.

Then, for the first time I truly got away from urban areas and saw the Milky Way. Nice.

For some reason or other, plastic and smog were the twin demons of my youthful environmentalism. Plastic was the epitome of the artifical---non-biodegradable, it lived forever (or three hundred years; don't ask me where I got that figure from), it was ugly, it killed for our convenience. (Eventually, plastic got replaced with radioactive by-products in my demonology.) Smog, and air pollution in general, are slightly less permanent, but they still linger and their effects tend to persist.

But light pollution...light pollution has this wonderful feature: the complete cure takes but a second. The moment the lights go off the pollution vanishes.

Television is like that as well. I've felt much cleaner not just since I've not owned one, but almost again as much since I've stopped going places where there's one on. The absence of its presence is a delight.

I suspect that the net, and, in particular, the web is like that too. So much of the web is simply pollution. Some of it interesting in its own right, or the way a pile of junk can be interesting, but the "net" effect is all too often a booming, buzzing confusion, a washing out of the night sky. Much browsing time and skill is spent trying simply to see the sparsely scattered specs stand clear against a mottled, blinking field.

And there is that curious distortion of perspective that occurs with full web immersion. A well crafted web page becomes a treasure. An interesting site becomes a comfort. Navigating through the maze of crosslinks becomes movement. And yet, I'm finding that wrenching my attention back to the physical world is like going out into the countryside. Monitor glow can be cured almost as easily as other forms light pollution, though it does take some times for one's eyes and mind to get used to the dark.