Slashdot Mirror
Experiment Cuts Off Online Junkies from Internet
Ant (an Internet junkie) writes "An article from The Register reports one begins gibbering uncontrollably because he/she can't get a fix without internet access after two weeks. That, at least, is according to an 'Internet Deprivation Study' carried out by Yahoo! and advertising outfit OMD.
Participants in the human experiment were deprived of the web for 14 days, and found themselves quickly succumbing to 'withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness.' The reason for the rapid collapse of their universe is - say the researchers - because 'internet users feel confident, secure and empowered.'"
What about the 5min average slashdot fix?
Next we'll see how people who are used to talking and communicating with others in person in every day life react when they are locked in a well lit room for two weeks with no human contact.
I'm going to give up the internet cold-turkey, and switch to something healthy, like heroin
Sheesh!
They should've tried it with some of the right-wing American slashdotters. The researchers would've got a shotgun shoved up their nose and told to reconnect the Internet NOW!
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
It is ratehr when I go hiking in the Swiss Mountains, I suddenly feel empowered...
I guess they should not just disconnect these "users" but rather offer them to practise some intensive sport activities instead.
Hiking in the mountains is a good candidate because it is also rewarding : you get to see some magnificent landscape when you reach the top.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Honestly, I would give anything to get away from the Internet for two weeks. A disconnection, though probably disorienting for a couple days, would be so pleasant.
Unfortunately, since all my work (read: paychecks) come from the computer, I can't do that.
That sucks.
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
Can't being on the internet all day/night cause this to happen with your real life? or is that just me....
Baudrillard was predicting this in 1981 in Fatal Strategies at least, and problably before that no doubt. "Must we put information on a diet?" (13, Semiotext(e))
ooooooo whats that big see through thing
:P
<doctor>we call that a window
<pt>urghhh M$ windows
<dr>no no, this is a REAL window, look no leaks
Bout time some of us took a walk outside I think, go walk in the countryside where we cant even get wireless for our laptops
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Im just using this stupid monitor and keyboard until I can get google embedded directly in my eyeballs. I really rely on that sucker.
I was just doing some MENSA puzzles, thinking "man, these are sooo easy". Then I realised I was just googling the answers.
I dont know what I'd do if I had to think for myself for 14 days.
I was in a class for 12 days in Hawaii and didn't miss my net access at all. If I hadn't been with the instructor who wanted to check her email during a day off at a nearby Internet cafe, I wouldn't have bothered. All I had was 132 spam messages anyway.
Now, taking away my books for two weeks would be another matter...
What's next? People sueing TimeWarner or AOL for getting them addicted?
It WILL happen sooner or later. And at the very least, expect the attept to be made.
Ya, call me cynical. But do I have a reason not to be in this age of "$$$ Jackpot Justice $$$"?
Life is not for the lazy.
I feel confident, secured, and empowered.....if only this translated to real life.
http://www.commaecho.com
wanna really see them twitch?
take away their cellphones too.
scott king
"Ask your doctor about Intergain for withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness during inconvient internet movements. Not to be taken while eating, drinking, breathing, typing, sleeping, driving, upgrading or patching. May cause excessive borrowing of toys from children. May also cause a desire for a girlfriend with a 300 baud modem and an 8 bit computer."
I was going to criticize this article as over-exagerated until I realized that I was reading Slashdot at 3:45am because I was having trouble sleeping. Oh well, what can you do?
I can relate. Freshman year of college (4 yrs ago) I could't have the internet for historical preservation reasons. I'd been addicted to it before I had to lose it, so it sucked at first. I got better grades, got more work done, made a bunch of friends, went out..., but when I got the net back, even though i was sort of better off without it, mentally I was like "ahhhhhh, i'm connected again"
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
I'm online a good bit of the time...but when I'm away from the Internet for more than a few days, I don't get some strange emotion called "Disconnected". That would imply that I'm away from part of my body or mind.
I do feel a bit annoyed that I can't talk with friends who aren't physically near me (I don't have a cell phone), and it's inconvenient when I want to look something up, but that's about it. I really don't see how someone who mostly just chats when they're online could get "addicted" to the Internet.
I'm an Webaddict.I didn't see it at first, how it hurt my family and loved ones. I didn't care to think about the people I'd rob to pay my subscription fees to the porn sites. And there's so many porn sites, soon the 7-11 wasn't enough, I had to hit the Shell stations and the Stop 'n Go, one morning I was real desperate and hit up the Krispy Kreme and I even took all the change in the big styrofoam cup, heh... I still can't forget the helpless look on that guys face. I don't know why I did it. Maybe it was because majormellons.com had just become a thing called a port hole or something... 35 brands of big busty broads... I ... I just couldn't help myself or something... yeah... and so much tit, more tit than you'd ever seen before, soon I was at 200 subsrciptions to all these other port holes and I was like the tit god of the frikken universe! All those girls at my finger tips, mpegs, jpeg galleries, live web feeds! All of it Mine MIne MIne!!! I was a real live electronic sex god! Whoooyah muthfukahhh! A sex god!!!! You hear that? A real live electronic sex ... mmmmfhhhhhh ... sex godmmmpthhhhh....
"And now we'd like to introduce another new member, Neville"
You're posting, at 3 am. to this story. /. changed to a non-number karma system, if pageviews make them $$$, you probably bought the new server which you constantly stress.
You have over 2200 posts.
You mod your pals +5 Funny and -1 Troll. In real life.
You constantly Profit! from ???
You can imagine a beowulf cluster of sandwitches.
You wonder if linux can run on your girlfreind.
You snicker at the last one, because you don't know any girls.
You can spot a goatse link from a mile away.
You are no longer shocked by goatse.
You still can't figure out why
You never get mod points.
You know all my posts are hilarious.
During the summer I generally go spend some time (up to two months, generally three weeks) away from cities and all internet accesses. The only thing I miss then, is the quick and convenient access to detailed information about any subject, so instead I go to the closest public library.
The daily comics, blogs, news, discussion forums, I don't miss at all, even though I tend to spend hours on them.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
"We couldn't plan a weekend getaway," confirmed Kim V, presumably from the house in which she had been imprisoned since the web embargo.
So Kim's parents, nor her grandparents, were ever able to go anywhere for the weekend? How in the hell did we as a species ever get this far, that we can suddenly become a bunch of helpless twits? Christ it's amazing, that in such a short time, humanity has gone so far backwards, head firmly planted in ass, as to be generating shit like this. I do take the article to be something of a joke, I mean it *has* to be.. Fuck, this is crazy, I have to stop drinking while reading this site...
All of you people are so interesting.
Game... blouses.
Seriously, the withdrawal is a bitch.
I tried to quit the Internet "cold turkey", but went right back on the wagon after two days of seeing dead trolls crawling around the ceiling.
Maybe I should have tried your heroin idea.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
"2 weeks without slashdot?!?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo....."
I was about to post how great it'd be to get away from Slashdot for a couple of weeks... then I realized I volunteered to visit.
Crap. It's just like smoking. >:I
"Derp de derp."
Last summer, my Linux firewall got 0wn3d when I neglected to update my WuFTP daemon. As a result, I had to bypass my firewall box and plug my main machine directly to the 'net. Well, I was too lazy to fix the Linux box, and lo and behold after a couple days my Windows box was 0wn3d too, this time with a spam trojan. Shaw Cable disconnected my modem due to the spam, and I was left trying to figure out a way to get updated virus tables on my box with nothing that would reasonably connect to the internet.
During that week, I was without the internet that occupied me some 12 hours a day. I didn't become incoherent, or babble, or anything. I became productive. I made myself breakfast every morning. I cleaned my apartment for the first time in a year. I even organized my tape collection, went through my old papers, and finished a model starship that had spent 7 years in drydock.
So it isn't as serious as this study leads it to believe. Likely they didn't get people who had internet COMPULSIONS (they aren't addictions, which require actual physical or chemical dependence) like myself, but rather people with out-and-out internet PATHOLOGIES. There's a world of difference between something you like so much you don't usually give it up (X-box, internet, TV, sex, rebuilding an engine) and something that you irrationally can't live without.
Who needs human contact anyway? Humans are SO out this season.
The real future is robots, sex robots in particular. With one of those I could avoid all human contact and still visit Slashdot regularly while being "serviced".
This just in. The telephone changed the way we all lived and undeveloped adolescent girls and boys spend inordinant amounts of time talking on it, describing a feeling of disconnect when deprived.
Get a grip. This exact same crap was said a century ago. The past is sooooo golden. That is, until you get there. Then it sucks.
Of course, when I got back home, my PC was grumpy and had several hundred non-spam emails to hand me, mixed in with spam about how I could win free trips to Hawaii.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The withdrawal symptoms from being disconnected depend a lot on what else you can do at the time.
If i leave on a holiday for 2 weeks I always leave my laptop at home, and i never miss it because i am in a totally different environment.
If I get disconnected on a rainy sunday on the other hand i'll be running around the house not knowing what to do
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
Pffft... they think they've cut me off, and that I've gone clean... What they don't know is, I snuck a Blackberry in by hiding it up my ass and I'm using it to get Slashdot! Gotta get my fix, you know...
Thank god for wireless, otherwise : )
This study didn't take into account all the possible factors that might be affecting their numbers. They blame the internet itself when the underlying cause might merely be something the internet provided them an abundance of.
For example, deprevation of pornography, I'm not trying to be funny here. The lack of this by itself could be contributing to some of the psychological distress these participants felt.
Lack of the extensive socialization the internet can provide. Some people are more social online than they would otherwise be in real life. And, if you consider the sheer numbers of people you might converse with online, the internet can be said to provide a far more diversified and abundant social experience. Forums, newsgroups, IRC, chatrooms, blogs, instant messenging, etc.
Much needed play time, which participants might not be experienced (due to a lack of attempting to find other things to do) in finding elsewhere.
And, computers in general can provide the instant gratification that human beings seek in their environment.
We can count out the last two because they were allowed to continue computer use without internet access.
There may even be physiological variables at work here. Such as what sort of monitors they were using, LCD or CRT? If they were using one or the other that might affect the results. Other possibilies are similar addictions that have been observed with television, how are these related?
At any rate, my point is that this study is far from conclusive about the effects of internet deprevation. Take it with a grain of salt. There are many factors here that weren't even considered. And, there is a lack of a control and experimental group. This study is simply not scientific. They seem to be treating it like a poll instead of a scientific study, but then they try to present the results as scientific evidence. It is foolish, don't buy in just yet.
That isn't to say the observations aren't material, but their methods and resulting assumptions are suspect. Was there even a hypothesis formulated? Where are the statistics?
Cheers.
Yet more support for the idea that geeks should be treated as poorly as possible, as often as possible.
.max
Frankly, there ought to be a test before you're allowed online. Y'know, ride a bike 100 miles, juggle, kiss a member of the appropriate gender, do somethig like they do on This Old House, demonstrate the ability to speak extemporaneously in front of 1000 people, 5 and one, for periods > an hour, and sit quietly in a room for a week all alone.
Compared to the people in the study, Comic Book Guy is a regular reniassance man.
.
where's my cattle prod?
Even when there isn't any real activity, I feel strange when I can't see what is (or isnt) said on IRC, how many spam e-mails I have or haven't received, what news have or
haven't shown up twice on slashdot and so on.
The connection simply needs to be there and active. My network being disconnected makes me feel disconnected too. Just knowing that it isn't connected feels like an itch,
and I have a hard time really concentrating until the connection is restored. Even if I'm not using it, or even if I'm not at home.
I recently have been on 2 5 day not only inet but power blackouts!
The 1st time was not so bad. I had my Palm fully charged and loaded with good books to read. And that is not unimportant as it seems because it is a back-lit screen so I could read at night without having to resort to a lot of lamps, candles, or flashlights. All but the latter generate heat, bad!, and the flashlights use up batteries quickly enough when there are none in the state!
I can say that I suffered no real ill effects but of course I had plenty of other things to keep me miserable at the same time. The sweltering heat, the fun of cooking without power, cleaning up the mess with chainsaws (Ok that one was kinda fun.), cold showers. But I did miss it.
Now the 2nd time was a little more rough. I lost my DSL as the storm 1st hit but still had dial-up and power. I was hopeful. Well that got dashed pretty quickly as the power soon went out again and into darkness and heat I plunged. I had changed up my backup Palm that I use for writing on the road but had forgotten to install the keyboard driver for it, doh! My main Palm was only 1/2 charged and it died about day 2. Back to reading by candle light!
I guess my example is a bad one because there were so many other variables involved but I can say that as someone who uses the inet probably way too much that I suffered no real ill effects. I used the time to do some writing the old fashioned way with paper and reading a bunch. I also listened to the radio a lot and knowing that everyone down here was pretty much in the same boat helped.
Oh, and btw as Jeanne is likely headed our way right now I have both Palm's charged up and ready to go!
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
The reason for the rapid collapse of their universe is - say the researchers - because 'Internet users feel confident, secure and empowered.'
Shenanigans. It's simply because they're disconnected from their friends, information, and entertainment. The same thing would happen if, before the prevalence of the Internet, you told people they couldn't use the phone, watch TV, or read a newspaper for 2 weeks.
I hope they didn't pay these "researchers" any of my money.
Doctor: "Timmy, you've been offline for 2 days and 3 hours. How do you feel?
".... omfg 14 new IE h0les by now... must linux troll..."
I remember this same type of study being reported when I was a kid (in the 1960s) only the culprit was Television. No doubt there was one for Radio as well, and possibly Telephones. Yawn. My whole family uses the Internet extensively, and although we go camping almost every summer and to Hawaii about every 2 years for stretches of 3 weeks at a time nobody has ever shown any deprivation symptoms. It all depends on your personality I guess. Or maybe it depends on whether some geeky psychologist is asking you a bunch of questions and making you feel important? Time to pop open an ice-cold can of Heisenberg.
My daily work life is tied to the internet, so are my 1000+ e-mails aday i get at home.
No internet for 2 weeks would be no work..no income ( or vacation, whatever that is ) and a overfull in-box..
While i would freak for not being online, its not due to addiction, its due to reality...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yahoo of all companies saying "See? You can't live without the internet." This is like all the Microsoft "studies" saying Windows TCO is lower than Linux.