Is Technology Bad For You?

NBC Universal has proclaimed this Healthy Week, but "health" and "consumer technology" are at best uneasy companions and, at worst, oxymoronic, sort of like a generous banker or an honest politician.

Not only do my decidedly unhealthy personal habits make me singularly inappropriate for dispensing health-related advice, my raison d'être – high-tech – is likely a major contributor of our ill-health.

While I am generally in good health, thanks to my Herman Miller Aeron chair (IMHO, the best office chair ever) I can remain comfortably ensconced for hours on end in front of my PC like the pilot in Alien. I have to make excuses to get up and move around; I half-joke that my daily exercise consists of walking from the bedroom to the office. Making lunch plumb tuckers me out.

The disease, not the cure

Even if I were a modern day Charles Atlas (more the  metaphorical 97-pound weakling he tries to transform  – and, yes, his company is still around), much of the consumer technology over the last century has encouraged unhealthy sedentary behavior, as I noted last week in "You Might be Tech Lazy If…"

In succession, the phonograph, radio, television, the computer, video games, the VCR, the DVD and Blu-ray player, the DVR, and now connected TVs and Blu-ray players providing access to all the content in the world from our sofa, have contributed to our coach potato evolution.

And how often do we lazily avail ourselves of motorized transport to traverse a distance we could easily walk?

Yes, the Walkman in 1979, Jane Fonda's Workout tapes in the 1980s and, more recently, the Nintendo Wii, got us moving, but these are electronic exercise anomolies.

Then there are "labor-saving" devices – the dishwasher, the washing machine and the dryer. And what did we do with all the dish washing and clothes line-hanging time and labor we saved? Plopped into our La-Z-Boy with a box of bonbons to watch our daytime "stories" on the boob tube.

We actually had to invent the whole idea of "exercise" in order to compensate for the sloth technology has induced. Can you imagine our farming forbearers even conceiving of voluntarily running, except to get away from something? You run – for leisure? Gadzooks, what manner of madness is this?

It's bad for ya

Worse, much of our modern technology is in and of itself unhealthy. The industrial revolution moved us from robust outdoor agrarian activities in the country into disease-infected cities, factories that churn out our high-tech goodies spew tons of toxic pollutants into our air and water, and both power plants and overhead wiring produce all manner of harmful byproducts and microwave side-effects.

Modern gadgets themselves are hazardous to our health.

At home, if we type or mouse badly, we get carpal tunnel. If we sit ergonomically incorrectly in front of our PC, we could hurt our back (are you sitting upright in a lumbar-supported chair with both feet planted on the floor and the screen at eye-level?). Staring at varying screens all day can produce eye-strain and perhaps a host of other vision problems collected under the heading Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) by the American Optometry Association.

Ear-tight iPod earphones piping Lady Gaga unimpeded into our aural cavity could give us tinnitus. Earphones also dangerously block out ambient noise, such as the honking truck rushing toward us as we blithely cross the street against the light. (True story: I was once listening so obliviously, I was unaware I had reached the last stop on the subway. Before I knew it, the doors had closed and I was trapped in the unmoving car in the station for 20 minutes. It's a good thing the cleaning lady wasn't wearing earphones or she wouldn't have heard me pounding on the window.)

How many times were we told not to sit too close to the TV because we'd hurt our eyes or we'd get irradiated? Okay, neither of those dangers are actually real, but the government has forced cell phone makers to publish SAR – Specific Absorption Rate – to warn us how much radiation we soak in each time we talk on the phone.

Yes, cell phones may cause brain cancer. I stress MAY. According to people who know, cell phones haven't been in use long enough for researchers to definitively gauge their long-term danger. But the signs seem as ominous as they did for cigarettes and cancer in the 1960s. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has an excellent report on the topic at CNN, and I'll have more specific comments about cell phone health concerns later this week.

You broke it, you fix it

I'm not a Luddite advocating we go live in a cave and eschew all modern technology, or don a radiation suit prior to using an iPad. But as Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow/Henry Drummond observed in Inherit the Wind:

[P]rogress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "Alright, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance…Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

And to enjoy today's electrical, motorized and digital wonders, we sacrifice a bit of our health, making it ironic to look to technology to solve the health problems technology has caused in the first place.

But here I sit suffering my own high cholesterol, presbyopia, weak back, muffin top and tinnitus, a victim of the modern age, nevertheless toiling over another "buy this new gadget!" exhortation.

So, have a happy Healthy Week!