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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.
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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)
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??
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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
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.
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.
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
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
Only in America do people feel the need to define themselves by 'disorders'
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?
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. ;)
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..."
just being on the internet is not the problem... the problem happens when being on the internet interferes with a heathy life style.
"oops... forgot to go to work"... oopps... "forgot to do the chores"... "ooops for got to pick up the kids"... "oopps... forgot to FEED the kids"...
at that point you have a problem.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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
I'm the same way.
/., email, CNN, my favorite 15 different websites 3 times a day, we're all the same way in this respect.
With regards to health, I think my original argument made allowances for that; if you are worried about your kids' health, you won't let them sti around on their asses all day. Brianrot and attention span have little to do with parental concerns at that point.
With regards to the fast paced, check up on
All I'm saying is that it is no less productive than playing around outside or throwing a wild party. It's a waste of time, true, but everyone wastes time. Physical activity is a copout answer; who feels mentally challenged playing baseball? Online, you are stimulating yourself at least, picking up new information and learning. Two sides of the same coin.
In all of the arguments that I've made with my parents over my 24 years of life, this is the only one that I really won. There are too many parallels, and they don't think they wasted their youth in a particularly bad way. The same way that if 20 years from now, I have a kid who thinks that GravSkating is the way of his generation, and I'm always telling him he should be stimulating his brain, he can criticize me for sitting on my ass all day and not getting anything accomplished, while at least he gets his blood pumping.
Every generation lives differently. We just need to accept that and try to steer them in their trends to be less wasteful. If my kid likes GravSkating, then so be it. But I'll do my damnedest to force him to appreciate the nuances of the game and make it a real investment of energy. The same way I wish my parents had taken an interest in my interests. My sisters play soccer, my parents can understand that.
Hence the Bridge example. My dad spent his college years playing Bridge. I wound up learning Bridge from friends, but he missed out on a real opportunity to interact with his kid by never passing it on. Playing bridge online would have been a lot of fun for me, and he at least would have felt better about my timesuck of choice, seeing some of his passtimes were being passed on.
I've started playing Go recently, and I think that's given me a new perspective on the generational gap. We can't force our kids to have our same interests, but we can find common interests that allow us to see that they are developing, despite our fears. Acceptance of that is probably the best thing we could ever do for them. I look at my Korean friends and see that most of them have parents who play Baduk (Go) and are in fact, very strong at it. Of those friends, the ones who learned the game from their parents seem to have a decent relationship with their parents, while those who didn't seem very distant. Granted, this is a small sample and doesn't reflect on Korean-American culture as a whole, and of course, only an parent interested in their children's development would bother teaching their kid a time-consuming game like that, but I think this is one of those examples that while not proving my point at least illustrates that it may be valid.
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"
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.
Seriously. Short of unplugging (which I can't do because I need the Internet to do work too) and going cold-turkey.
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.
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.