We stepped into the elevator of our Manhattan hotel only to be assaulted by a virtual mugger. There on the control panel, high up and out of reach, was a video screen tuned to one of the cable stations, blaring headline news at an ear-splitting volume.

The doors closed, trapping us inside the little acoustic box with enough decibels to shake our fillings loose. Luckily, our room was on the second floor. Pity the poor folks who had to ride up and down from the 30th.

It has come to this, I thought: I actually miss Muzak. And so, another frontier of sensory overload is breached, not with a bang but with Wolf Blitzer. Not that I mind the guy per se, but if I wanted to ride the elevator with him repeatedly, I'd do it the old-fashioned way: I'd stalk him.

This business of bombarding captive audiences with electronic input is way out of hand. The incursions are already standard annoyances at airports, train stations, the car mechanic's waiting room -- and, most egregious of all, hospital emergency rooms, where people are sick enough already. Now we're not even safe between floors.

Soon the only refuge from unsought, unwanted information will be 20,000 leagues under the sea -- until some enterprising soul devises a way to fill the ocean waters with holographic mermaids reporting LIVE from Davey Jones TV!!!!

Back home, I ran a computer search on elevators and television. Up popped several stories bearing the bad news.

"Video screens in office tower elevators entertain -- and sell," said one headline. "Going up? Down? Video screens coming to an elevator near you," said another.

Turns out the Gannett media conglomerate and the newly formed Captivate Network (they got the first two syllables right) have persuaded building owners to pay to outfit their elevators with flat screens that play a silent stream of visual media content. But my hotel experience shows that where video goes, audio is never far behind.

Commenting on the news headlines, stock prices, weather forecasts and ads, one passenger in a video-outfitted elevator said, "It just gives you something to look at, versus the awkward moments of standing in an elevator with 10 other people you don't know."

This is one of the advantages of living in a place like Pittsburgh. We may be broke, and losing our airline service, and most nights you can shoot a cannon Downtown without hitting anyone, but at least lamentable trends like this take longer to arrive.

I called the Noise Pollution Clearing House in Montpelier, Vt. The organization www.nonoise.org is running campaigns for quiet classrooms, lawns, lakes and car alarms, but nothing on elevators. Yet.

Executive director Les Blomberg had just been in New York and had his own first encounter with elevator video.

"This almost says more about life in the 21st century than it does about noise," Blomberg said. "It's a comment on us, or what these building owners think of us."

Are we really so uncomfortable with other people that we can't make it down from the 22nd floor without a video buffer to protect us? And anyway, Blomberg said, "If you ride five floors, how much information are you going to get? Are you going to ride on past your floor to get the rest of the news? It just feels like we have to fill every second of our lives with electronic communication.

"Is there any social benefit from this? No. Is there any harm from one elevator with a TV screen? No. But when you combine the cell phones and beeping laptops and TVs in public places and boom cars on the streets, then yeah. It's cumulative."

The truth, he said, is that you probably get just as much useful information from staring at the electronic floor counter. Then at least you know what floor you're on.