Word: herze
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Author J.C. Herz was on the telephone, talking to her editor -- no, beseeching her editor: "Don't make me go back! Please, don't make me go back there." The place she dreaded was sometimes in the living room of her tiny cottage apartment in Coral Gables, Florida. Or it was on the tiled floor at the foot of her bed. It was anywhere, really, that the 23-year-old writer could sprawl with her laptop computer, reach a telephone jack and plug into the Internet...
...months Herz had been online every day, six hours a day, researching a book she was writing called Surfing on the Internet. She yakked with people on Internet Relay Chat, vamped in simulated worlds known as muds, foundered in E-mail and bombarded her brain with Usenet newsgroups carrying names like alt.alien.visitors. Finally, she couldn't take another bit. "It was the classic information overload, toxic-data syndrome," she says, with more and more messages to read and less and less time to read them. The Internet "stopped looking like some kind of theme park and started looking like...
Though her editor forced her to return to the Net to finish her book, Herz has since resurfaced in the real world -- for good. She joins the growing ranks of disillusioned refugees who ventured into cyberspace and have now made the long march back. They bring tales of unmet expectations and warnings about a shimmering electronic mirage that seemed to promise intellectual, emotional and even financial sustenance but delivered nothing real. There's too much information and not enough substance, they gripe. Millions of people and no worthwhile communication. A solipsistic time sink that makes television watching seem like...
Marion R. Herz, an environmental protection specialist in the EPA's Indoor Air Division, cited respiratory tract irritation, colds, sore throats and cancer as the major effects of second-hand smoke on college-aged young adults...
...recommends that smoking should be banned outright indoors," Herz said. "If not, smoking should be limited to a separately ventilated smoking room and the air must be exhausted outside of the building...