Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Life and Internet Anxiety Disorder
ChipGuy writes "Broadband brings the world right to your laptop or your handheld. With it comes information, and along with it comes desire to stay connected, and on top of everything. Om Malik calls it Internet Anxiety Disorder. 'The rush to catch-up and living a six megabits per second lifestyle, is what I think is going to be first major malaise of the 21st century - Internet anxiety disorder,' he says. Firefox developer, Blake Ross thinks that 'Internet hardwires developing brains with a click-happy sense of urgency that will not defer to reality. We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it's not available.' Others have described this info-addiction as Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder."
Part of this is that you have to consider that for many of us, the Internet has become a daily part of our workflow and without it we could not perform in our jobs. I absolutely need the Internet to collaborate with colleagues, and because I am paid to know things and to think, the ability to be able to search for information and access online scientific journals is critical. I cannot believe how much time I spent as a beginning undergraduate in the library looking through actual card catalogues! Now one can survey tremendous amounts of data in very little time, but the tradeoff is that we have become dependent upon the Internet for our data gathering. I will admit however, to also becoming dependent upon the Internet for daily news as well and do feel a sense of loss when disconnected. For instance, when taking hikes or going biking in the mountains for longer than a day, I feel the need for an information fix. Even when traveling nationally or internationally, I ensure that I am connected via broadband, can communicate through iChatAV with colleagues, can post to my blog, can get the latest news as it happens and of course, keep up with Slashdot. :-)
Of course the referenced links do contain valid points, particularly Rand's blog. What Rand alludes to however and needs to be learned is the ability to focus and extract the absolutely relevant information related to the task at hand. I've noticed in the undergraduates in particular that have come through the lab that they tend to try and multitask everything, talking on the phone, performing Internet related searches, writing their reports and listening to music while also running an experiment in the background. Almost always, mistakes ensue, the quality of the work suffers, wrong conclusions are drawn and it takes them a couple of months to learn to focus while eliminating some of the competing tasks to ensure quality work for the essential task at hand. Once they learn to focus, not only does the quality of their work improve, but also their ability to extract information from all sorts of tasks including Internet related work. Confusion goes away and is replaced by efficiency of thought and action.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
My line went down yesterday. Longest 10 seconds of my life.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
just like me constantly refreshing the "nothing to see here, please move along" page, only to read the comments that aren't even there jet...
Even though the online page says "come back on day X", students still checked the page frequently. This is what I mean when I say it's impossible to evaluate my generation's behavior according to old standards or even according to common sense; I really believe the Internet hardwires developing brains with a click-happy sense of urgency that will not defer to reality. We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it's not available. (Blake Ross)
Already about thirty years ago I observed people who ran obviously faulty pieces of code a second time hoping for a different outcome; my guess is that humans love voodo but that it ususally does not work. So I do not believe that there is another "Generation X" (whatever).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Gary Numan's Replicas is slowly becoming reality...
Obsessive compulsive disorder for one. And masturbation! And anti-social disorder. And nerdiness!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
NADD? That was seriously the best that they could come up with??
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
While nerds are kept busy with the internet and counseling sessions, gorgeous women everywhere are free to live their lives without fear of nerds asking them out.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
The rush to catch-up and living a six megabits per second lifestyle
and yet the first site they jump on is Slashdot, which usually has the effect of slowing the servers it mentions down to a crawl...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I still can't believe this isn't an April Fools article.
Someone must be late to the game.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Thanks to the Internet, the majority are alienated from the mainstream.
please change me. - sig
I've already read about this on Fark, Boing Boing, and Wired. Blogging on it's so last month and I've already IM'ed on it with my FOAF pals. If you want to know more-- oops gotta go-- my Treo's got an SMS!
Yeah, like I'm going to tell people that I have NADD.
Yeah, I know this thing. It's the reason i've started going downhill in school; I can't get away from my PC. Now, I must revise. Ooh, Half-Life 2!
Could not open
I'm sure hunter-gatherers had the same desire to stay on top of everything in the forest. The brain can be overloaded at much less than six megabits per second. You can become paranoid without this so-called click-happy sense of urgency. If you really think about all the smells entering your nose, the wind through the leaves, the snapping of twigs in the distance, you can fully wig yourself out. It's not about technology, it's about devoting too much of your consciousness to any of your senses for too long. I suggest meditation, jogging, or any exercise that turns off that over-active cortex and sends you to another place. The internet is just a new form of stimulus that you can dwell on too much. Nothing special. Nothing new.
What the hell does he mean by "not available"?
It's plenty available!
I mean, I watched the cute Flash animation for ThinkGeek and got my Day Pass. I see the article in the Mysterious Future. I click on it. It's under construction. I click on it again. It's still under construction. I click on it again. I [several hundred pageviews omitted in the interest of brevity] click on it again - at last! I can post!
I, for one, am against the usage of any acronym that is so close to nad. In fact, the pronounciation would be exactly the same.
That would like the Society for Trendy Undeserving People Instigating Debate
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
SHouldn't be Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder.
I reckon: Nerd Attention Deficiency Syndrome would be better.
NADS for short. Perhaps it's a load of bollocks...
The rush to catch-up and living a six megabits per second lifestyle...
I'm sorry but this line kills me... some computer dork trying to sound cool was like a car guy quoting Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious...
I live my life a quarter mile at a time, nothing else matters, for those ten seconds or less, I'm free.
Shutdown slashdot for a few days, see whether all the geeks become anxious.
liqbase
This sounds a lot like what William Gibson called NAS (Neural Attenuation Syndrome) in Johnny Mnemonic. It's also been described by Vinge in True Names, and in half a dozen other SF stories under a variety of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and ETLAs (Extended TLAs). This article represents yet another victim of EPAS (Endlessly Proliferating Acronym Syndrome). Add to its list of symptoms, the inability to find out that others have already coined acronyms and there's no need for a new one. Obviously, we must give till it hurts to find a cure.
Who is John Cabal?
For this same reason, I check the Slashdot RSS feed continuously when browsing even though fairly often. This despite the fact that I often get the sense that "there is nothing to see here...move along"
I guess it doesn't help that it is so easy to open a gazillion articles in Firefox tabs and the fact that I have 50+ RSS feeds in the browser.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
NOBODY RAID! THIS IS A MOVE!!
Back off, all of you! I've got an 'OFF' switch in one hand, and a pair of dikes in the other, and I'm NOT AFRAID TO USE THEM!!!
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I walk in the door and within thirty seconds of hanging up my keys I've logged back into the main machine and flipped open the lid on the iBook, even if I'm only coming home to change clothes and head back out the door in five minutes. If I'm at home or at work, it's exceedingly rare that I go more than an hour without hitting news.google.com, topix.net and slashdot.org. Of course, I generally know what's going on in the world in a pretty timely manner, even if I don't have (or take) the time to learn anything other than headlines and article summaries.
I definitely see the web as a detriment to workplace productivity, but there's no simple solution for those of us who make productive use of the web in our jobs. Of course, by and large slashdot doesn't help in my job (although friends here have pointed me to some valuable technical solutions and resources), and it's the vast majority of the non-essential browsing I do at work. Of course, when I'm truly busy my bullshit web use drops sharply, so I guess that means it's not too strong a compulsion.
Okay, time to stop typing in a browser window and go do some useful stuff on such a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
*wanders off to check the news sites while another cup of coffee brews*
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
It's what we do. Information is always available, unless you're in a sensory deprivation tank or something, in which case you may well start hallucinating, because you aren't "addicted" to information; you require it for proper functioning.
I think some people are addicted to labling everything as an addiction.
Maybe it has something to do with our rather bizzare cultural perception that if you're enjoying yourself you must be mentally ill.
Actually, now that I think about it, given the state of our culture, they might have a point.
KFG
I live my life a quarter pounder at a time, nothing else matters, for those ten seconds or less, I'm free.
Our parents were always heading outside to play baseball, while we stay inside and play Quake, leran about obscure topics, or program something we thought about earlier in the day.
Their parents were always criticizing them for having wild parties and never doing their studies because they're always playing X or Y.
In turn, they criticize our generation for the different lifestyle that we lead.
Simple fact of the matter is that these are different times. If you are a parent worried about your kids' attention spans, find them something to do online that won't 'rot their brains' or 'decrease their attention span'. Teach them to play Bridge or Go or something that is genuinely fun but requires a bit of study and practice. They're very rewarding and at least you won't have to worry that your kid is getting dumber. It's hard to think of someone as less intelligent than they used to be when they can kick your ass at a game like that.
Parents, find a healthier outlet for your anachronisms.
That having been said, I haven't read TFA. They may well be right that attention spans are decreased. All I'm saying is that's not the end of the world.
Only in America do people feel the need to define themselves by 'disorders'
yep.. I definetly suffer from this, I'm not addicted yet and I CAN stay away from my pc for days and weeks even. BUT its stress-mania when I get back, backreading days and weeks of slashdot and other pages. Checking for updated drivers and updated soft etc..
I wonder how long before this overtakes obesity as the no.1 healt issue in the western world.
Strangely enough, I can relate to the converse of what the article states. I am a 56K user, and I find myself less dependent on fast downloads and fast obtainment of information. I know many people that are DSL (or broadband, in the case of this article) users, and they tend to be much more anxious and impatient.
"Internet anxiety disorder,' he says. Firefox developer, Blake Ross thinks that 'Internet hardwires developing brains with a click-happy sense of urgency that will not defer to reality."
"Gotta Have it NOW"
"We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it's not available.'"
Reflected as Consumerism, and Illegal P2P activity.
Using the Internet to gather news, it's obvious that there's more news than can be read in a day, created each and every day. It is unfathomable to me that someone could become depressed with such limitless access to information and humour everywhere around them.
Why slashdot? Why not?
This is why people have a large portion of their brain dedicated to ignoring stuff.
It's True!
The thalamus filters information heading towards the cortex, and the reticular activating system (in the brain stem) filters out extraneous information, i.e. constantly present odors, background hums, etc. You'd go crazy if this was broken.
Nice Marmot
...if I'm not in denial, I get a cookie and a free iPod, yes?
I'm tired of people elevating every little habit into a pathology. Ever met a hypochondriac? I've met a few, I think there's a human tendency toward it. Just like this tendency to call everything a disease. I say humbug. Slashdot's losing it when this is the crap they're approving. Sheesh.
While I mostly agree with your comments, there are certainly cultures that would be more prone to this overloading than others (namely, industrialized Western society.) "I'm sure hunter-gatherers had the same desire to stay on top of everything in the forest" contains a bit of naive realism - assuming that other cultures view the world the same way ours does. Hunter-gatherers actually have a very easygoing lifestyle, with much less time per day spent laboring or attaining food than in industrialized or agricultural societies! I remember seeing an anthropological video about the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rain Forest (a present-day foraging people)... the Mbuti had commented that the forest was a sheltering friend or protector, but the outsiders from "modern" society who inhabited other parts of the forest saw it as an enemy, something to be frightened of and cut down. Clearly there is a difference in how these two groups viewed their world. The Mbuti did not have a controlling world view, felt no need to "dominate" or "be on top of things" - these are Western expressions, where we feel the need to control our surroundings and know everything. So while overloading may be nothing new in United States or industrialized Western cultures, please don't assume this is something that is common to the entire world. ;)
And if you are still using dial-up? Do you have a greater case of Internet Anxiety Disorder or just slowing getting it?
Pat
This is just info-porn addiction in a new medium. 15 years ago we were discussing the same topic with regards to people who obsessively watch cable news channels. Sure, the internet version will have it's own unique twists, but let's have some sense of history, please.
The few months after I got my cable modem (all 500K of it), I was totally addicted. Having come from a POTS 1200 baud background on the old Atari 800, this was quite a huge difference.
Soon after, I had a shitload of useless things running in the taskbar (big clock, weather indicator (like I can't look outside once in a while), dl/ul speed indicators, FTP/IRC/etc. - all sorts of crap. All of it designed to give me more information, most of it useless.
And yet...
I couldn't...
Pull...
Away!
At one point I called off work for a week. Then came the girlfriend breakup that I kinda ignored. After a while reality set in and I started to pull back a bit. I'm glad I did - I've known some who didn't in time. One guy I knew back in the early 90's started selling drugs to support his computer habit. None of us geeks even knew he was doing it until he called us from prison. He got 6 years of 'no computer'.
Always wondered how he seemed to be dialed into AOL all the time (before flat rates were in effect)...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Yeah, and having no connection out in the hinter lands would be, let me see, a pain to the NADDs.
You gotta love it....
The slashdot editors are merely looking out for our mental well-being. By posting dupes, the chances of missing story drop, effectively (or ineffectively) reducing the urge to check the page.
Give them a break. They're just trying to help.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
For instance, they tried for years to prove unsucessfully that coffee drinking was bad, they've put thousands of childs under chemicals for behaving like kids, they managed to put a ban for years on alcohol drinking, they suspiciously look under your bed sheets to make sure you don't obsessively engage into sex, etc.
This We Want To Control Your Life Addiction Syndrom can hurt anybody, so be careful. You could be next.
I find that any internet addiction I may have disappears very quickly when I visit my parents. They still dial in to the local provider, and because they live in the middle of nowhere, the top speed they get is 24kbps. Even email checking can get really painful at that level, and don't even try to IM someone at the same time!
A good book and maybe a paper take care of my time then.
I set mine up to block webpage advertisements.
(Actually true. I've been surfing the internet since prodigy was a BBS system. Ever since the ads started I've been dedicatedly ignoring them. Sometimes to the point where I don't even see them.
When I am working on an oil painting and make a mistake, there is just a little part of me that reaches for CMD (CTRL) Z to undo it. In my mind somewhere, I mean. (not joking) And I also have a distinct feeling of "Quit and Save". Unfort. the real world doesn't have a "restore".
Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder - NADD.
"Mrs. Green, can I be excused? My NADD is kicking in."
"Dude, I've got NADD too!"
"I'm going to kick you in the NADDs."
"We need to talk about your NADD."
dbitch
I was forced offline by my parents for three days for anti-social behaviour (not talking to them) and I ended up extremly depressed by the 3rd day since I couldn't distract myself with information. wikipedia, ./ , http://www.livescience.com/ and http://www.physorg.com/ . when I got back on the net I read everything I missed, got new anime episodes ect.. Right now I'm browsing, playing Dune2 with dosbox, watching an episode of Friends, chatting and compiling wine.. and I feel happy.. sometimes I add an anime with subtitles so I read that also. Thing is when I'm out with friends more I don't need those things, IAD is just a sympton of being alone+bored.
This is my sig.
There have always been people who are addicted to "news". If they don't know "what's happening in the world", or are prevented from accessing their favourite news medium, they actually suffer a sort of panic attack. Some are quite unreasonable about it, such as making everyone else in the house stop talking for the duration of the evening TV news.
I've observed this disorder not only with the internet, but in previous eras when the primary news media were television, radio, and newspapers. I've read about people in the 1800s who got quite upset if they didn't have access to the latest broadsheet. In one form or another, it probably goes back to the era of town criers.
I have a suspicion that it derives from an abnormal compulsion to "take control" over one's environment, and knowing "what's happening" helps provide an enabling comfort zone.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
F5....
F5....
F5....
Come on! Post a new article already!
F5....
F5....
F5....
F5....
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
See above where I comment about what I hereby dub News Anxiety Disorder, the compulsion to know "what's happening" and a sort of panic attack when prevented from doing so. You make a good point that even in the most primitive times, there probably were people who just HAD to keep track of how many bison were in every herd they knew about, how many birds their neighbour shot last week, how many people complained of the smell from the privy, etc, etc, as if their lives depended on it. Perhaps it's fundamentally a specific survival instinct run amok (or failing to mature**), to the point that it overwhelms other instincts and behaviours.
** A lot of little kids exhibit a sort of news anxiety disorder, but most outgrow it, along with the other sociopathic behaviours that are normal in kids but not in adults.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The main reason is that it is cheap to be on the internet. If there were some cost associated with our browsing, I am sure 90% of web browsing would drop to almost nothing. Nothing more than economics, plain and simple.
IAD & NADD !!!!
Constructs like that make me want to hit people with a baseball bat.
is what I think is going to be first major malaise of the 21st century
You mispelled "excuse"
This may be true if I am at home and the connection goes down. I don't have anything else planned necessarily, so I'm kind of anxious for the connection to come back up. But I can also take 2 weeks to go camping and I feel fine. I would like to be able to check my email to see if anyone is trying to contact me, but I'm not going to be driven insane due to that. But that's no different than having a phone and checking your voicemail.
In today's world where ignorance seems to be praised by many, if there's any addiction we need more of, it's an addiction of information and learning more.
This is what passes for an article these days?
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Seriously. Short of unplugging (which I can't do because I need the Internet to do work too) and going cold-turkey.
...Western expressions, where we feel the need to control our surroundings and know everything...
Even living in an industrialized society does not force anyone to be anxious to control and know. Anyone can march to the beat of a different drummer and there is no need to allow the culture to squeeze anyone into a particular mold. Everyone has choices and then has to live with the results of those. Your TV and computer has an OFF switch, which only YOU control. Use it, and then go outside, especially in this spring time of the year and marvel at the new life bursting forth all around. Admittedly, for us here, living in the mountains of Southern Oregon, this is easier than for someone living in a 29th floor apartment of a large city. Even so, there are green places in most cities where the wonder of spring time can let you forget the frenetic pace of life for a while and think about what is REALLY important, such as the human relationships apart from technology.
All theory is gray
as if its such a bad thing to desire information.
what they call "reality" is just THEIR reality. its their take on how life is to be lived. ie without such desire for information, or at least such motivation to seek out such a desire.
again another example of selfish people dictating subjective views onto others
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim...
I dunno these days they'll diagnose anything as a disease, disorder or syndrome. In fact anyone that hasn't got a syndrome is probably suffering from "No Syndrome Syndrome".
Life is like an analogy
The key, I've found as a busy college student, is simply to control the information influx (there is no line between information and entertainment, they are merely a spectrum so I'm going to refer to both as information). When I'm reading, I close my IM client. When I don't feel like it, I don't answer my phone (which can result in "call me or I'll think you're dead" messages from my mother during protracted periods of busyness). When I don't have time, I don't watch TV, the newest Netflix DVD or the newest episode of Battlestar Galactica that finished downloading that day. There are times when anyone, including myself, will fail in controlling the influx of information, but it is important to remember that the majority of information we are "addicted" to is unnecessary. Certainly in business a certain amount of quick response to VM, email, IM, snail mail, and faxes is necessary for both courtesy and business success (or just not getting fired), but the majority of information that people people find themselves awash in they partake in of their own free will. By this, of your own free will you can step out of that flow.
The same goes for TV, magazines, newspapers and even just gossiping and talking. As a personal example about six months ago I realized that despite how much I get out of The New Yorker's news articles, they took up too much time and we're the best use of that time for what I wanted to do. Most of the information influx we experience anyone can make such a choice about.
thread. I'm gonna go check out Google News for the 50th time today. :)
Why were these articles written as if this was some hot new topic?
This was a hot topic years ago. Why dig it up again now?
(quote) "We are addicted to information and seek it even when we know it's not available."
As William Armstrong said:
"However high we climb in the pursuit of knowledge, we shall still see heights above us.
The more we extend our view, the more conscious we shall be of the imensity which lies ahead"
Lord William George Armstrong 1810-1900
I can log off anytime I want. This is not an addiction, I just choose to be online. I don't have to be connected, it's just, you know, like chocolate, it's good, satisfying, it's where it's at.
But I could stop anytime I want. Really.
Self-hypnosis is also very relaxing (and arguably, the same thing, or at least an overlapping thing with meditation, yoga, etc..)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
James Beringer's The Control Revolution touches upon this very subject. I'd recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Western society's transition from an industrial economy to one based on information. Fascinating read for anyone who's interested in technology and civilization.
I've always worked from home and most times the work computer was in the living room so no separation between life/work. However, it was dialup and the computer would crash every couple of hours. Sometimes it wasn't even on.
Now that's all different. It's more effort to turn the computer off. All those times during the day when I want a little piece of information like the forecast or when a movie is playing take only 1 second to find out but it encourages you to keep the thing on all the time 24 hours a day. I can be doing the dishes and I'll hear the e-mail "ding". It's pretty hard to ignore that.
In the old days all those little pieces of information came in one package at one time and if you didn't know something you went out to get it to just winged it. Another poster theorized that it's all about the human desire for more control. We're at the point where we can control so many things excessively that control is becoming an activity in itself.
reading books. I have a huge collection of paperback fantasy, sci-fi and fiction which I have only read about half of. Sometimes I get on a reading kick for a few weeks.. then one day just stop reading and go back to the Internet exclusive for months at a time. TV does not come into the picture at all anymore. If somebody (the government or microsoft) ever takes over the internet and starts controlling what I can see, thereby ruining the Internet, I am going to have a massive fit of rage... and heads are a gonna roll baby!
Meh.
use an rss aggregator =D
Coincidence? I highly doubt it.
Don't forget the "what's in the fridge?" phenomena, where you're hungry and you look in the fridge to see what's good to eat. Finding nothing, you go off looking somewhere else or just do something else. Five minutes later, you're back at that fridge, wondering what there is to eat. (even when you're *not* high! ;)
"I woke up this morning and decided -- you know...I should go online. Someone called me a NADD. Well. I was suitably offended and right away I called them a PIG. See if they call me a NADD again, they'll regret it." -Jack Handey
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
just more anti-geek propaganda. There's never been a "tv anxiety disorder" or "football anxiety disorder"
BTW: The last line of your post gave me a very big zen hardon.
go NADS!!! sorry, couldn't resist;-)