Net gardening for couch potatoes

Gardeners with no time for gardening can have now a virtual vegetable garden

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By Paul Sussman CNN.com Europe writer

Mankind recently took another giant step away from the real world and into the virtual one with the launch of a Web site for gardeners who can't actually be bothered to do any gardening.

www.myveggiepatch.com offers all the thrills and spills of cultivating your very own crop of turnips without any of the attendant dirt or hard work.

Those with herbaceous hankerings can log on and order a personalised vegetable patch, specifying which vegetables they wish to grow, and in what quantity. The patch is then planted at a real farm in Suffolk, England, allowing the proud owner to log on at to see how the crop is doing.

When harvested, the goods are delivered to your home. The cost? Up to £995 ($1454) for an organic patch.

But for critics, it is another sign that the Internet age is divorcing us from the realities of life.

Reactions to the scheme have been mixed. According to Richard Knock, one of Veggiepatch's three directors, there has already been a flood of inquiries, with five definite bookings.

Malou Weirich, Secretary of the Luxembourg-based International Society of Allotments and Leisure Gardens, is less enthusiastic, however.

"My initial reaction is a negative one," she says. "For some people it might work, but personally if I'm going to have vegetables I'd want to grow them myself. The whole thing becomes less meaningful if it's at one step removed."

Weirich's comments feeds into a wider debate about the extent to which people are, as a result of the Internet, becoming increasingly divorced from the real world.

The level of technology is such that it is now possible to live almost one's entire life via a computer screen, substituting virtual experiences for real-life flesh-and-blood ones.

"There isn't much you can't do on the Internet now," admits Ben Carter, a reporter for New Media Age magazine. "You can do your shopping, arrange car insurance, listen to music, buy a house. For many people it has become a way of life."

There are, of course, obvious advantages to the new technology, not least the fact that it can save a lot of time and trouble. Why waste your lunch hour queuing to pay money into the bank when you can do it in a couple of minutes via a computer terminal?

At the same time, however, there are concerns that a growing reliance on using the Internet for all our daily needs will not only effect us physically, creating a generation of overweight couch potatoes, but emotionally too.

"I think there's a real danger in it," says psychotherapist Phillip Hodson. "Basically you're erecting a screen between yourself and genuine experience, and that's not healthy.

A brief cruise around today's Internet reveals the extent to which it is possible to lead your life without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home.

On an average day, for instance, you might wake up, tone your stomach with a brief session of online belly dancing (www.bellydancetime.com/), and then settle down with an online newspaper and breakfast ordered via the Internet.

Having dressed -- in clothes ordered online, naturally -- you would commute to work, although as one of a growing number of Europeans who work from home this would involve nothing more strenuous than meandering downstairs and slumping in front of your computer terminal.

Lunch, like breakfast, would be ordered via the Internet, and eaten in the company of a group of group of friends you'd met in an online chatroom.

Virtual reality seems to be embracing more parcels of our everyday life

You might then decide to take the afternoon off and go for a wander around Belgrade (http://www.beograd.com/ visual tour/), or on safari (http://www.toursaa.com/ KRUGERPARK/safari.htm), or even a deep-sea fishing expedition (http://www. interplaysports.com/fishing/), before spending the evening in ancient Rome getting drunk with a group of vestal virgins (http://www.cybersites.com:8080 /twep/rome/), eventually staggering off the internet at three in the morning and passing out on your living room sofa with a half-eaten pizza (ordered online) abandoned on the floor beside you.

"We're in a vast social experiment at the moment," says Hodson. "It's all very well developing our frontal lobes, but we still need physical activity and contact with other humans.

"If we don't have that we will break down, and so will our society."

Although Carter admits that technology is making us a less active society, he nonetheless believes we are still a long way from a Brave New World scenario where Mankind ends up existing vicariously through computers.

"We'll find a happy medium," he insists. "There are plenty of people who don't want to have their lives controlled by technology. Some balance will be reached."

Sceptics, however, remained concerned about the degree to which the Internet is coming to dominate our daily lives.

"We are social, sensual creatures," says Hodson, "Anything that stops us having face to face contact with our fellow humans is going to make us more depressed.

"In tests on monkeys, for instance, those that were deprived of physical contact became deranged."

Just as well, perhaps, that one of the biggest growth areas on the Internet at present is in online psychiatric counselling.

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