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The Internet Might Not Be So Depressing
generic-man writes "In a follow-up to a controversial 1998 study linking Internet use to worsened depression and social difficulties, Carnegie Mellon University professor Robert Kraut now says that the symptoms of depression started to recede after a while. The New York Times (free registration required) has the story in today's Circuits section." We covered this way back in the day as well.
Then you find out what your fellow humans actually think. Wow. Scary. Depression and anger are a natural outcome of this process.
I'm reminded of the alien race from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who were telepathic, but couldn't stand being able to hear the thoughts of their neighbors. The aliens became avid fans of mind-crushingly loud rock music in order to drown out the thoughts of others.
It's certainly possible that, in 1998, the internet (or, more specifically, online conversation) was depressing, because so many of the people were new to it. Imagine: you are in a society where there are millions of people around, and you haven't met anyone yet. Many of them seem to know each other already. None of the people you know from elsewhere are around. If you were the only person in your state to have a phone, and you spent your time dialing random numbers, you'd probably be depressed.
Three years later, everyone you know from real life is online, you've met a bunch of people online and interacted with them enough to become friends. Now the internet is convenient and social, and not depressing.
If the 'net isn't as depressing as it used to be, it's more likely due to the improvement of anti-depressant drugs, which may not have happened without the net itself, yada yada...
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I would presumably be easy for people like google to add a commercial content filter that only returned search results that weren't tagged as being commercial sites. I'm not sure exactly how they'd decide who was commercial or not, although that database could be built by users a la CDDB.
It'd be pretty cool to get a different view of the web - to see the 99% dark web rather than the 1% commercial web.
On the other hand, I think a more accurate explanation for this phenomenon is called "information overload". I get a mild depression after I begin investigating a broad new topic, just from trying to absorb vast amounts of information. I get a mild depression a few hours after entering a large city (after being away from large cities for a while).
The original study was irresponsibly presented and reported, but no one reads retractions. And thus it's a given that at this very moment, somehwere in a big city, a kid is listening to loud rock music, using the internet to teach himself about programming for the first time, trying to ignore his mom outside the bedroom door screeching, "Turn off that internet! You'll get depressed!"
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
How could the Internet be depressing? Sitting alone in my dark basement at all hours of the day and night reading mindless slashdot comments... No personal contact except for when the mailman comes... Jeeze, where did I leave my razor blades...
When I first read the headline, I thought it said "The Internet Is Less Repressing", and I thought it was Yet Another DMCA article.
"Wearily on I go, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow. I despise you all."
Ahhh... now I see... Marvin was just an AOL user.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Sorry for my bad English,
need to go get some sleep.
The internet used to be a medium where anyone could (and did) post their thoughts, mulling over the minutiae of their daily lives. Nowadays, people just bitch and complain about every little thing.
Yes, it's so refreshing to finally move out of a state of general depression, and into a state of general anger.
I find the internet more depressing all the time...
Favorite quote: "'There was an audible buzz in the room' when Dr. Kraut started to discuss his findings." (The audible buzzes are more pesky than the inaudible ones.) Sounds like Dr Kraut's colleagues found it more interesting to talk among themselves than to listen to him.
Second-favorite quote: "I like to be influenced by the nature of the data rather than having strong preconceptions." Translation: "I have no idea what my preconceptions are, so rather than going through the hard work of sorting them out, I'll just pretend I don't have any."
Look - two studies by Dr Kraut come to opposite conclusions and Dr Kraut (I'm not making this up!) explains this by saying that the research subjects themselves changed in the interim. Why is anybody taking this seriously?
1998 was the peak of the dotcom bubble, if memory serves. Our economy was booming and couldn't produce enough to sate our consumption. People were working long hours under high stress, and were losing time with family and friends not to mention outside interests. A few years previous these same people might have come home, flipped open a can of beer and watched the tube for a couple of hours before hitting the sack. In 1998, they came home exhausted, twisted open a bottle of Trendy-Power-Drink TM and logged onto the Internet for a few hours before turning in. Couple of years later, the boom's gone bust, we aren't putting in the mandatory over time, and we have more free time, perhaps more than we'd like. So we start reconnecting with our friends and family, in person, and online, and dust off all those hobbies we'd been wishing to get back to. The followup study leaves me with more questions than I had after the previous one. The other thought is that maybe some of the depressed, lonely people online a few years back made the connections online that helped them out the hole they were in.
It's more likely that people with mood disorders obsess over the internet, rather than the net itself making them depressed. Take IRC (not just aol chat rooms) for example: those who spend inordinate amounts of time chatting (idling/plotting world domination/etc) probably suffer from some kind of mental idiosyncracy (ie. depression). Instead of taking mental illness seriously (and doing something about it?) it's likely that many out there are looking to make excuses instead (and spend lots of cash on trying to prove silly things).
Joseph Kalange, Boise, ID, USA
In police departments, especially large cities, often police officers are rotated out of criminal investigations units on a regular basis. They get transfered to a lighter duty unit, like traffic, or something, so that they have contact with real poeple, and get to have a chance to unwind from dealing with criminal types all the time.
I am sure that the psychs have the same issue. Their view gets tainted, and they see evidence of mental disease all around them, even when it is not true. This also tends to be self re-enforcing, because it is good for business.
You could even speculate about something like the prevalence of mental illness in the mental health profession. You could have something like a "paranoid hypochondriac", which would be someone with the illness of seeing illnesses all the time in everyone else. Instead of worrying about themselves being sick all the time, they would worry all the time about other people being sick. A paranoid version of hypochondria. This would naturally fit in well in the medical and mental health community.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm not depressed. I just lock myself inside the house for hours at a time, with the shades drawn, and listening to the Cure. I have friends! I type stuff into boxes and responds with all sorts of results! Zoloft and Prozac are foresaken! I've got Google!
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
It certainly wasn't depressing for this guy.
It took them three years to find that out? Now that's depressing.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
A few years back I could search for, say, "thai food" and without much additional effort find a kewl recipie from someone in Thailand with an html editor. Back then, I might be inclined to write the author a short note, thanking them for their help (and maybe suggesting kicking up the hot pepper a little). I would say things like that contributed a lot to the attraction of millions of new users onto the internet.
More recently, due to factors like the IPO bubble and paid placements in searchengines, doing that would be a lot more likely to point me to a site maintained by a dotcom operation, with lots and lots of ads and product tieins and some semi-obvious goo-goo doing whatever method of persuasion they can think of to get me to enter an email address [yeah, right]
Ignoring marketing crap like that has become almost subconscious, like slamming shut a popup window before the graphics even begin to load, but even so I think there's a cumulative effect that comes from having to deal with hucksters and panhandlers online on a daily basis, and it isn't uplifting. Knowing that our internet, not to mention our society and culture, is like this (for the time being anyway - a lot of these places are folding as their funds run out) is just simply sad.
One minor point of sublime satisfaction: With Linux i can kill the netscape thread and restart my browser without rebooting when it locks up from some bad m$java, or activeX, or Flash, or whatever those jokers uploaded to do stuff clandestinely to their customers. Incidentally, when I'm talking to Windows users about Linux this fact, along with added security, goes over real well.
I suppose having said all that I should disclaim that I'm not at all an antimaterialist, and that I do when necessary like to purchase online often. The merchants I buy from respect me as a customer and I in turn don't begrudge them the money.
Different businesses have different methods of operation, and deeply different values. The good guys and the others are all equally capitalistic, but the marketplace is and will continue to favor one attitude over the opposite as long as the playing field remains level. The ultimate destination of this process isn't depressing at all, but the present noise level while all this is taking place can be in itself a little annoying to listen to at length without a break.
give me a
If you only talk to people through IRC, how do you know if any of them kill themselves or run away from home and become prostitutes and junkies? All you know is that you stop seeing some people online.
Did you have a control group of depressed kids in the same socioeconomic class that did not use IRC? Do they fare any worse or better than those who use IRC? How do you know that IRC "helped the kids you are talking about 'snap out of it'"? Might they have recovered from depression anyway?
Science and statistics are not that hard. I'm not trying to pick on you personally because I see these leaps of faith and assumption throughout the posts I read. You just happened to be post n+1 where n is the number of posts of that type I can read without replying.
This applies to lonely people in the aol chat rooms. It has nothing to do with most of us. I get pretty damn excited more often than not at 2 am while on page 312 of hacking exposed.
-Manic Depression, searches my soul, what I want, I just dont know.
Ain't you depressed when you learn you have been fragged 214 times in a row by a 12 year old living 6000 miles from you, so you can't even spank him for not showing the respect he should have had for your elderly fingers and cracking reflexes ?!?
8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Yes, the Internet can be very depressing at times. Like the phone system and the electricity network, those make me depressed too...
Seriously, how can a *medium* be depressing? It all depends on how something is used by the individual. I haven't bothered reading the article, but I don't care about how the majority uses the Internet and feels depressed by it (or not).
Maybe it was the lack of bandwidth and everyone just sitting there waiting for a page to load or a download to finish that was causing depression. Today bandwidth levels are rising and everything is much more zippidiedodah..oh there I go with my happy bandwidth song again...
Personally I get really excited watching paint dry and grass grow.
--
That's why CMU is planning on building a campus in sunny California, far, far away from the dread evil grey eternal cloud cover that looms depressingly over its otherwise exciting robotics-clubbing, ethernet-chugging, Quake 3A-loving campus.
People use statistics to warp the truth and form biased results. I love how, in the original article, they claim less than one percent increase in depression and lonliness. Wow. Less than one percent increase. That's ridiculous. If anything, people became more depressed because they realized they just made a huge mistake in wasting several hours on some stupid study.
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
That's Mr. Eradicator to you.
trance-port