Typically there’s always been limits on what could be sold online.
While not impossible, selling art online is difficult because it’s is challenging to engage your customer with a small ‘preview’ of the art, and anything larger than a thumbnail might get stolen/resold by unsavory types.
But what happens when your customers aren’t online, and don’t even use electricity or cell phones? This seems unthinkable but there’s a growing community in the US for WiFi refugees.
In November of 1958 the Federal Communications Commission setup the first and only national radio quiet zone to negate possible interference with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. This zone is an impressive 13,000 sq. miles of mountainous terrain that is a perfect natural shelter from radio interference.
The degree to which the area is protected is a bit staggering.
I recall reading a story on the area in a 2002 Wired publication where they interviewed a ‘patrolman’ who protects the area from intrusions.
In that article the fellow describes how he had to locate a source of new disturbance that ultimately turned out to be an old electric blanket that was used to keep a dog house warm. The blanket was worn and had started shorting out, causing the radio interference. The patrolman was happy to replace the blanket with a new one and remedy the source of interference.
This morning the web has been buzzing with an article documenting the area as a safe-haven for WiFi ‘refugees’ or people who believe they are victims of ‘Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity’ or ‘EHS’, a non-medically recognized sensitivity to electromagnetic interference within the human body.
Many controlled tests have been performed on suspected suffers of the condition, yet not one has been able to scientifically assess whether the effects of electromagnetic fields have the ability to produce symptoms in the human body.
Never the less there is a growing community of ‘refugees’ that swear they had no choice but to move to the area in order to mitigate symptoms they believe are directly related to exposure from electronics and wireless radio signals. In one case, 70-year old Nichols Fox claims that she is better off dealing with the risks of gas powered lighting, refrigeration, and heating because her body reacts so severely to the presence of electronics.
The community is puzzling to many, and Bob Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland is one of them. Professor Park’s observations conclude that radiation emitted by wi-fi is simply too weak to cause the type of changes in the body’s chemistry that could make people sick. He went on to state the following on this topic :
“The bigger problem that we face is that in our society, driven by technological change, people have very little education” he says.
“There are lots of things people need to learn and they’re not learning it. The thing that’s going to kill them is ignorance.” – Bob Park
So, to anyone wishing to provide services to such a community, you clearly are out of luck if you wanted to approach the problem online, because your client base would never see the offers you are promoting.
This is truly sad news for fans of the AFDB like Canaille and her owner Wally Glenn: