Contemporary American society, if no one else, has been generally taught that there's no sensible danger to being surrounded by consumer electronics and continually bathed in artificial electromagnetic fields, spanning a vast range of wavelengths, from 60 Hz house-current radiations to the extremities of microwave communication. We put microwave transceivers in our bedrooms and hold them next to our heads. We spend hours a day staring at unnatural sources of visible illumination as well. I daresay that humanity still hasn't quite adjusted to the sudden explosion in computer-display technology. I still remember when it was a novelty to put forty lines of text on a TV or monitor. In my early college years, an 800x600 monitor could still seem a bit extravagant. Then I put my head down for a bit, lifted it back up again, and suddenly there was 2400x1080 on a pocket telephone. Most of us, if we're privileged enough to have free access to such equipment, fearlessly spend a majority of our lives in close proximity to it, drinking it in.
The standard line, the word of public scientific authority, is that there's no significant danger. The energies involved are small, not enough to risk danger of tissue damage through thermal heating, and such low-energy photons scarcely interfere with chemical reactions. All the same, the human body does function as an antenna. It's a mass of material with certain electrical properties; it's bound to have a certain specific cross-section for electromagnetic radiations, an absorption spectrum. So where does the energy go? It's small, apparently not grossly harmful, but...what's it actually doing?
It's far too easy to go wild with this, haring off into the land of conspiracy theories about mind-control beams and EM weapons and that sort of thing. The Internet has been a fertile ground for such outlandish hypotheses and that's done a lot, I daresay, to discourage reasonable persons from giving the matter any serious thought. The conventional assumption is that there's no danger and the conspiracy loons are upset about nothing. I hazard to guess, however, that there is a sensible middle ground between "it does nothing" and "it's putting thoughts into your brain". I suggest, at least, that human beings can dimly perceive a subtle shift in their feelings when they're around computer equipment. Even a vague feeling, a slight sense of difference and nothing more, is something that people notice. It affects their behavior, like any slight irritation does.
Subliminal phenomena, events that only partly register with conscious perception, are exceptionally commonplace (especially after you've started to direct your attention to them) and I feel as though they've been mystified a bit and made to seem deliberately outré. The very word "subliminal" is redolent of conspiracy talk, conjuring up notions of Commies slipping propaganda posters into single frames of movies or something like that. In truth, subliminal phenomena are often quite boring. Someone far away is talking, but you can only make out the occasional word. There's a nearby stream of water and there's a hint of a voice or music buried in the noisy rush of the stream. You walk past someone's house and there's the briefest whiff of geraniums, or skunkweed maybe. You'll never be able to recover such feelings—they're too indistinct or too brief.
Technology produces many such subliminal phenomena, I think. The light of the typical computer monitor is very much unlike natural light sources, and we subtly pick up on the uncanniness of the light. Ordinary objects look sharper and more detailed upon close physical examination; examine a computer display closely and the image blurs and loses definition. We're surrounded by many flickering light sources, and even if the frequency of the flickering is supposedly beyond the human eye's capacity to distinguish, there's still a faint shimmer or weirdness about such flickering light, detectable especially when the eye flicks rapidly from one direction to another. Technology makes noises we're not used to, hums and whirs and whines that certain persons can pick up better than others, if only because there's considerable individual variability in auditory range. And if I'm right about human beings possibly having a vague sense of being bathed in strong EM fields of certain wavelengths, certain persons might be unusually attuned to them.
I suggest that it might become pleasurable for some—or at least, a necessary precondition to a sense of well-being. To use non-scientific terminology, it's like there's a certain aura around computer equipment. "Aura" might well be a reasonable generalization of any sort of force or influence, whatever the physical source, that extends some distance from a thing's boundaries. To say a thing has an "aura" is merely to say that it has a kind of "sphere of influence" larger than its physical size. That's a reasonable general idea, and thus one can perhaps say that modern technology is awash in auras, chucking out all manner of unusual radiations and emanations, even smells. It only stands to reason that certain human beings might particularly enjoy the sensation of them.
If that's the case, I feel it's got certain implications for why the culture of high technology has become so unhinged and disconnected from the needs of the general populace: the people who are really into this stuff immerse themselves in it, and live their lives in closed rooms stuffed full of computer and communications equipment. It's the element they swim in, and perhaps that's the only place they feel happy and feel like they can think clearly. (Ironically they might be muddle-headed from carbon dioxide, instead.) There's no need to invoke conspiratorial ideas about mind control; the bald physical facts of the situation are worrying enough. It's like all these high-powered nerds might be subtly intoxicated all the time, bathing in the atmosphere of their thinking machines and imagining themselves pervaded by their superior intelligence.
~Chara of Pnictogen