Reality Landfill...

A friend returned from a month outside of Miami where he was taking care of an ill grandparent. "There was no public transportation, no stores nearby, no nothing," he explained. "I bascially spent an entire month on the Internet."

Just as land fill once transformed unusable marshlands into priceless waterfront real estate (as in the case of lower Manhattan), today the Internet is expanding the surface area of "reality" into a vast new frontiers. The trick with this virtual reality is that we dictate the content and the flow rather than enduring the local realities we would normally confront. Which begs the question: If you spend a solid month in virtual reality or on the Internet Googling each and every whim and remote interest and following the natural procession of random links to new and unknown information, do you come out the other end a smarter more enlightened human being, or do you come out with a headache and a fat ass?

RIP Monsieur Baudrillard. You saw all of this coming, didn't you?