An article in the Sydney Morning Herald recently caught my attention… Two million internet addicts. As folks that don’t readily reveal their age say, I remember the time… when internet wasn’t even part of my life. Although, I have no clue what I did in place of surfing the net in those days… Playing outside, watching television or talking on a land-line connected phone with a friend (remember those days when we cell phones weren’t as prevalent?), perhaps?
Now, there’s isn’t a given day where I don’t check my email, stalk my friends on Facebook, track the weather (for biking preparedness), chat with other online addicts friends or just surf the web at least once. Okay, granted, working online and writing a blog doesn’t help… But, when I see half my friends on their smart phone obsessively replying every constant ding from a new email or text message… or when any vacation I take with friends or family entails at least one person bringing their laptop… or when I dine at a restaurant and see the entire table next to me typing away on their data-capable phones rather than actually conversing with each other… I start to wonder. Is the Internet more of a hindrance than it is helpful? We were just fine without it before, but does that mean we could do it again?
The internet has definitely become the stem of many controversial issues — take Australian censorship or the ethical usage of Internet regarding patients for example. What we thought was already a small world (after all), has been made even smaller and more accessible through the world wide web. Email. Instant message. VoIP. Streaming media. Technology has evolved and zipped light years past the days of the Pony Express and Morse code.
Of course, with the good, comes the bad — there’s always that balance, right? Internet has caused a rise in negligence and violence. The Sydney Morning Herald notes a couple of instances:
Last month, a couple let their three-month-old starve while they raised a virtual child in an online game, spending most of their days at an internet cafe instead of caring for their newborn, police said.
That baby died of malnutrition. Oh, and hold on, there’s another one:
In February, a 22-year-old bludgeoned his mother to death for “nagging” him about playing internet games, police said. He then played games online for hours, paying with his mother’s credit card, a police statement said.
In South Korea, where these two instances occurred, more than 90% of households have broadband internet access. In addition, 24-hour internet cafes are abundant in Asia. As an alternative to staying the night at a hotel, much of the younger population partying late hours in Japan opt to spend the night at a 24-hour internet cafe until the train systems start back up in the morning. In Taiwan, internet cafes have become a popular hangouts — even ranging from cheap, affordable facilities to ritzy, expensive surroundings. Dr. Kim Tae-hoon, a psychiatrist who treats teenagers for internet addiction says, “In South Korea, it’s easier for citizens to play online games than to invest in their offline personal relations through face-to-face conversations.” He continues by noting, “People are becoming growingly numb to human interaction.”
The University of Maryland conducted a study asking 200 students to give up all media (Internet, cellphones, television, music, etc.) for one day. Is it surprising that, according to the New York Times, they found “many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links” after just 24 hours? One student confesses, “I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening.”
Although the American Psychiatric Association has yet to recognize Internet addiction as a disorder, South Korea has already decided to take action against the estimated 2 million people classified to be an addict. The South Korean government will be “restricting access to popular online games, and is sending counselors to elementary schools to teach children about healthy internet usage.”
The United States’ first in-patient treatment center for Internet addiction opened for business last summer near Redmond, Washington. The center, called reSTART, gives various examples of students who have become largely in debt or even dropped out of college due to internet addiction. But erm… the $14,000 price tag for treatment could be cause for self-help in of itself — or perhaps another reason to continue on(line)?
Stanford University’s School of Medicine estimates that one in eight Americans show at least one sign of internet overuse. A Huffington Post article by therapist Lisa Haisha, even takes internet addiction one step further by examining specifics, Facebook addiction. “Since the term Internet Addiction is broad, some psychologists have identified and classified sub-categories of Internet addiction,” says Haisha.
Director of I Will Center, a government-funded counseling center in South Korea, Park Hye-kyung says, “It’s a little ironic that what was invented to make our lives better has come to make it worse for some.” Could you do without Internet? Has it harmed your way of living more so than helped it? I’m stuck; I have no idea…What do SND readers think?
2 comments
Lisa says:
April 26, 2010 at 8:37 am (UTC -7 )
This article is so true. I accidentally left my cell phone at home last Thursday when i went to work and i felt so weird. What if something happened? What if i got into a car accident or something? LOL. Once you become used to something you become so dependent on it. For this reason i have refused to get an iPhone or Blackberry or any of those fancy phones (regardless of how cool they are). I don’t want to become any more dependent on my phone than i already am.
Heather says:
April 27, 2010 at 10:08 pm (UTC -7 )
Obviously, addiction is a problem for people all over the world – and with a new thing to become addicted TO, such as the internet, there will be examples of internet addiction (and we all have started to feel the tugs of technology).
I just think it’s important to clarify: About the 2 examples cited in this entry, the child neglect and matricide examples, it doesn’t seem exactly accurate to say that the internet caused these things to happen. They are very extreme things done by obviously disturbed individuals – individuals who, even without the internet, may have still committed these heinous acts under different circumstances that didn’t involve the internet. I think the irony in the first example was the reason it was reported. And, I wouldn’t mind seeing some actual statistics on whether there’s been a rise in violence and/or neglect since the internet became commonplace – with our 24-hour news cycle these days and (ironically) the internet making us much more aware of what’s going on all over the world, it seems like it could just be that we are more aware of examples of such tragedies.