electrosmog, miracles and e-junk

This page considers what has variously been tagged datasmog, electro-smog or electrosensitivity. It also looks at e-waste or e-junk.

It covers -

• electrosmog
• e-miracles
• e-junk

     electrosmog

David Shenk's provocative Data Smog (New York: Harper 1997) asks are we suffering from information pollution. Others more tendentiously have warned about infoglut or information overload, cyberchondria and web addiction.

There appears to be more substance in warnings about electromagnetic pollution (aka 'electrosmog'), with concerns about exposure to high-tension power lines and electromagnetic emissions from computers, monitors and of course mobile phones. Claimed electrosmog problems encompass fatigue, headaches, nausea, sleeping disorders, depression and cancer - with 2% of users supposedly suffering from Electrical Hypersensitivity Syndrome (EHS) or Electrosensitivity (ES).

Estimates of how many people suffer from ES are problematical, ranging from 8% in Germany to 4% in the UK and 3.2% in California.

The World Health Organisation commented in December 2005 that

There is no scientific basis to link ES symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, ES is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.

Critics have pointed to double-blind provocation studies, such as that by Rubin et al in 2006, in which ES sufferers are placed in a room with a mobile phone or other device that supposedly triggers the symptoms. The sufferers are not alerted when the device is actually switched on; results suggest that symptoms are independent of the device's activity.

One point of reference is Adam Burgess' Cellular Phones, Public Fears & A Culture of Precaution (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004).

Students at MIT more naughtily offered guidance regarding the 'tinfoil beanie', favoured by people since the turn of last century. It is a suitable complement for nostrums such as special boxer shorts, brassieres, mattresses, chairs and dog collars that will repel dangerous electromagnetic waves.

In the pre-radio era, as Jeffrey Sconce notes in Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Uni Press 2000), the telegraph and telephone were claimed to curdle milk, render people sterile, fade curtains, attract lightning and even ghosts.

A sceptic would be forgiven for believing that not much has changed since the days when promoters spruiked copper corsets or exotic wristbands to ward off sinister emanations from the family radio. In 2007 the UK Independent, fretting that electrosmog harmed potplants and people, featured a writer who suggested

You could also try the Q-Link pendant, which employs "sympathetic resonance technology," something that the makers declare "repairs and tunes your biofield". Friends who wear a Q-Link report that they feel healthier and more energetic.

The homeopathic medicine company, New Vistas, and the Australian flower essence company, Bush Flower Remedies, both make drops that claim to reduce the amount of radiation stored in the body.

Also, for the past two months I've been using an electro-magnetic field protection unit plugged into a wall at home. The device was created by engineer and homeopath Gary Johnson. Disturbed with the increasing number of patients coming to him with skin problems, exhaustion, blurred vision, and symptoms similar to chronic fatigue syndrome, he suspected that they might be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation (EMR).

"The heart of the unit is a programmed microprocessor unit that produces a holograph field that is amplified through an internal aerial system. This protection field protects the human system from the negative effects of EMR"

Pollution is not peculiarly modern. Perspectives are provided in works such as Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996) by J Donald Hughes, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2007) by Emily Cockayne, The Big Smoke: a history of air pollution in London since medieval times (London: Methuen 1987) by Peter Brimblecombe and Pollution & Reform in American Cities, 1870-1930 (Austin: Uni of Texas Press 1980) and The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 2000) both edited by Martin Melosi.

     e-miracles

Human credulity is evident in acceptance of email miracles - a distinguished lawyer or African banker just happens to have chosen you to share his spare $45 million in pre-loved greenbacks - and in credence of bizarre claims such as exposing an egg to a mobile phone will cook it (PDF).

For some people the line between magic and science is blurred. Some people during the Jazz Age thought that radio would allow them to communicate with the dead. Others cashed in on a fascination with radium by marketing thorium-enriched face powder, radium-enriched toothpaste (a must for that glow-in-the-dark smile), radioactive blankets, radium suppositories and girdles, radioactive water dispensers (notably the Revigator) or bottled radioactive water (eg Radithor, "Perpetual Sunshine in a Bottle" marketed as "A Cure for the Living Dead" and famously consumed by Eben Byers, who quite soon was dead rather than living) and the delightful Radiendocrinator, marketed as a sort of Lindbergh era version of viagra.

     e-junk

Almost as much attention has focussed on the notion of 'e-junk' or 'e-waste' (no nasty is nasty enough with the magic e prefix).

In 2004 the UK Environment Agency claimed that nation disposes of over 1 million tonnes of computer monitors, servers, personal computers and mobile phones (along with 500,000 television sets and 3 million refrigerators) every year. Supposedly some 23,000 tonnes of ICT hardware went offshore illegally, typically to jurisdictions such as China, west Africa, Pakistan and India. In 2005 it was claimed that the average amount of Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) disposed of by a single EU consumer of over a lifetime is 3 tonnes.

There is a more detailed exploration of environmental impacts elsewhere on this site.

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