I’ve got a condition. “Oh, we know!” I hear you say. But I mean a specific one. Fast moving images make me nauseous. It can be debilitating. I can lose an entire day because I’m stopped at a railroad crossing while boxcars speed past my eyes. Or because some found-footage filmmaker can’t hold the camera still. As the old moralizing children’s song goes, “Be careful little eyes what you see.” The internet has thus cast me into a kind of personal Hell. You see, it has to do with scrolling. To find things you have to scroll. And scrolling, if I’m not careful, can make me quite ill. When I try to find an old post on this blog, where the keywords are too common, scrolling through old posts can make me ill. “Ah,” I hear you say, “turnabout is fair play.”
But seriously, scrolling can really be an accessibility issue. An unrecognized one, for sure, but still an issue. I have very long lists. Books I need to read. Movies I need to see. Stories I haven’t finished writing. And to find things, I must scroll. It’s worse with pictures. With pure text you can sort of avert your eyes. Of course, you might miss what you’re seeking. A small price to pay for not spending the rest of the day with your head between your knees. If you’ve been to this blog a time or two, you know that I consider myself a neo-Luddite. I use technology but I am ambivalent about it. It sure makes navigation easier (until you lose the signal, then you curse yourself for not having a paper map). It helps physicians and makes book buying much quicker. But it can also make you sick.
It is possible to create this kind of nausea on the printed page. It’s also easier to catch the early eye-strain that warns an episode is coming and close the book. Besides, most books don’t cause this to happen. Increasingly, scrolling is triggering it. Looking for an image in the thousands of posts I’ve published here to reuse to illustrate a point. Trying to find that book I know I saw on my endless Amazon wish list. And just how many movies do they have on Netflix anyway? Merrily we scroll along. It’s just that some of us have to pull over to the side of the road awhile, get out of the car, and breathe deeply for a bit. Don’t worry about us. Just speed on by. There are places to go, and me, well, I’ve got a condition.