Slashdot Mirror
China Defines Internet Addiction
narramissic writes "Three years after the first clinic dedicated to Internet addiction opened in Beijing, Chinese doctors have now officially defined it as an ailment. Those afflicted with this ailment spend six or more hours a day online and exhibit at least one of the following symptoms: difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to be online, irritation, and mental or physical distress. Do you meet the criteria? You're in good company: About 10 percent of China's 253 million Internet users exhibit some form of addiction to the medium, and 70 percent of those people are young men, an official Xinhua News Agency report said."
Does this mean I am addicted?
I read that as "China Defends Internet Addiction".
I hear they also have a problem with youth in asia, but I've been assured that the government has the problem well in hand.
-
About 10 percent of China's 253 million Internet users exhibit some form of addiction to the medium, and 70 percent of those people are young men, an official Xinhua News Agency report said.
News Anchor: And in today's news, an unnamed Chinese dissident has been treated in Beijing for <sinister sounding voice>internet addiction</sinister sounding voice>. After monitoring his internet usage and anti-government e-mails through his ISP, the government was able to find the man and get him the help he needs at a special government run institution at a remote location for his own good. Let's hope he has a swift recovery ...
My work here is dung.
I totally hope they have this in North America, I could totally go on workman's comp as my job requires me to be online all the time.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
How to tell if you are addicted to Slashdot:
You your recent posting history has more posts than days.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think someone made this point a long time ago in a comment: If you were as oppressed in your daily life as the Chinese, you might spend a lot of your time where you can be "free" in some form of context, social, MMO, whatever. It's not always about escape, there is also immersion and just plain wanting interaction. We all know that anything can become physically addictive, and whether or not some term is coined for those things or not, it's simply human nature at work.
Each of which is all too easily inflicted at the hands of a PHB (cluelessly imposing impossible deadlines), without one single minute of WoW involved...
difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to be online, irritation, and mental or physical distress.
Get a real addiction--I sucked dick for bandwidth!
Step 1 is admit your addiction... yup, i'm addicted.
Well if step 2 is submit to a higher authority.
Well, I have submitted to the power of Google.
Now leave me alone, I got me some good internet.
Seriously conflicted here. Addiction should never encompass anything that the bulk of society uses every day. I would imagine that the fundamental definition for any addiction should include a majority of negative repercussion, or at least that the addiction would cause the person's ultimate doom.
Look at alcoholism. Approximately 2% of alcoholics get Korsakoff's Syndrome, which ultimately destroys the person's sense of reality while Thiamine B6 is absent from the 3rd & 4th ventricle of the brain long enough for damage to erode/reconfigure brain cells. There is no parallel result in internet addiction, apart from mood swings and perhaps suicide attempts, but these are all mostly related to social mishaps online. Internet abuse does not cause anything like Korsakoff's.
Drug addiction, seems to all fit.
Alas, where a parallel could exist would be with sex addiction, although one could argue that the STD's cause your doom.
About the only thing Internet Addiction could cause is An Hero Syndrome (NSFW).
Medically, there could be serious degenerative disorders as a result of being fixated in one place for long periods of time, or perhaps dietary issues from eating and drinking the worst possible food in order to have more time online, but again that's all a bit of a stretch.
If I had to guess, I would say that the term Internet Addiction is a misnomer. This is more aptly that people who struggle to get back online crave attention because their own lives are sparse or deficient in areas of socialization, so they feel powerful online and therefore need it.
I think there is a long way to go on this subject and China's efforts, while interesting, are not quite there yet.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The Internet is simply ingrained into my life. Imagine a world without coffee. I wouldn't care much because I don't have a taste for it but I bet that millions will cry out in terror and will suddenly be silenced(faiting by lack of cafeine in their bloodstream :) ). Now imagine a world without the internet. I can't. I could. Around 10 years ago we got 33k dailup to get access to "this curious thing called the internet". We used it more and more untill one day we got a bill of 120+ eur and we knew it was time to switch to cable. Every since that moment I and the internet have been connected. If I want to look up an address or zipcode I go the right site and tada, zipcode and address. If I want to look up a term I go to Wikipedia, type the word in and tada, I've got the meaning and some deeper information about the subject. I check my mail every day to see if I have recieved any messages from people and institutions all over the world. If I want to know about technological development I visit tweakers.net or slashdot. I discuss on internetforums in many different countries and have developed my skills in some foreign languages that way.
I am not the only one. The whole world is addicted to the internet. Sending data is now something you do with a few clicks and a few lines of text. You can send huge amounts of data from Vladivostok to Bogota in a matter of seconds. People all around the world can check videomessages people leave on youtube.
Now imagine that somebody "turns off the central switch". I can only fear what would happen. Stock markets would probably go bananas because they are not being fed regular data. The most important letter exchange format in the world(e-mail) would cease to be and sending messages to eachother would become a matter of days not seconds. Distributed projects would die and it would cease to be effective. And that's only the things I can think of. Imagine the extra effects.
We are all addicted to the internet whether we use it or not. That's the paradox.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Yesterday they announced that taking cholesterol drugs when healthy is a good thing. I told my wife that no one is healthy anymore; we are all simply waiting for a chronic disease to strike.
Today 10% of China's population is declared "sick". So now we don't have to wait for a disease to strike us - we already are diseased, but the doctors haven't told us what we have yet.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
So if my blackberry is constantly connected to the internet and it's on 24/7, I guess that means
...
...
I'm ... what were we talking about? I was checking my mail.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The problem is just as bad, if not far worse there. The prolific MMO play-rate [plus localised social networking] doesn't help either.
But somehow, I don't see Korea classifying it as an illness anytime soon.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
IMHO, an addiction should have some physical counterpart. If it's strictly mental, it's just a bad habit.
For example, an alcoholic will get the DT's if they don't drink. A heroin addict will convulse and sweat if they don't get their fix. A cigarette smoker will get headaches, tremors, and an increased appetite without their smokes. I should also mention that alcoholics and some other drug users, when quitting cold turkey, can actually die from withdrawal.
Take away and addicts internet and what, they read the paper or watch TV instead? That's not an addiction, sorry. Take the internet away from an 'internet addict' for a week and they will have found other things to do. A drug addict will still be thinking about his drugs... for months and even years.
I should mention I smoke cigarettes, I'm a recovering alcoholic and have had various drug addictions when I was younger and stupider. I use the internet all the time and even play WoW, but it's hardly an addiction and don't see any possible way it could be classified as such unless there are marked differences in brain chemistry or something like that.
I'll run your comment off right off the rail
1. We admitted we were powerless over the Internet (even the filtered one in China) - that our lives had become unmanageable (Communism is good).
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (already defined as Google) could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (Eric Schmidt) as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral database inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God...er Eric, aka EES, to ourselves and to another human being (Probably in the IT Department) the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have EES remove all these defects of using another browser other then Chrome.
7. Humbly asked EES to remove our IE8 Beta installs.
8. Made a list of all persons we had pwnd, and became willing to make amends to them all (China's really working on this list too, really, honest).
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, buy supplying them with stolen credit card numbers and boxed copies of the English show "The IT Crowd" except when to do so would injure them or others, or if they already own it.
10. Continued to rewrite our personal inventory database and when we were wrong promptly debug it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with EES as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out that we will no longer "Do Any Evil" .
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other Chinese Internet Addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs on our brand new Android equipped devices.
(disclaimer: I'm in REAL 12 step program - if you are too and don't see the humor in this, tough shit)
6 hours a day?
L4|\/|3rz.
Thanks to virtualization, I spent 6 hours on the Internet in just the past 40 minutes!
By what methodology do you judge which addictions are valid? The cure to "crack addiction" is STOP SMOKING CRACK, but saying it in capital letters doesn't make it easy.
You make a good point that not *all* addictions are true "addictions", but it's a point we already know. The question is - how to determine which are, and to what extent? It isn't helpful to try to oversimplify a potentially complex question in psychology.
Those are symptoms of people who aren't high-functioning addicts.
Any addiction is defined by one simple criterion: can the person exercise self control over the behavior?
The question can become existential: what if they don't want to quit? If they're high-functioning, they might never have call to exercise self control. In which case what's the difference whether they're addicts or not? The only question then is whether something might change requiring their quitting, and they might not be able to, which could be a problem.
Besides, everyone is "addicted" to food. Few complain about the addiction, except people who can't afford to eat, who have some other compulsion/obsession that conflicts with eating, or who have a compounded problem of eating too much. But we all live with our basic addiction to food, which isn't really a problem, and is even celebrated. Why should any other addiction matter, if there are no bad symptoms?
--
make install -not war
Don't forget that there is a huge mental health industry with a vested interest in creating (oops, I mean "identifying") new classes of illness that they will have to paid to treat.
I suspect that what's happening is that they are identifying something that has become a pillar of an individual's life-style and then claiming that this constitutes an "addiction" because the person suffers anxiety when the thing is taken away. A person with a normal social life would start to exhibit anxiety and yearning if socially isolated. How often do we hear someone who is trapped at home due to short term illness say something like "I need to get out, I'm going mad stuck here"? That person must be addicted to going down the pub or addicted to work.
I probably fit the Slashdot stereotype of being fairly dependent on Internet access. I had to go without Internet access for a couple of days recently and I found it frustrating not to have it. By the time I got onto the ISP customer support, I was sufficiently perturbed to be firm with them. However, I haven't watched live broadcast TV in over ten years. Instead, I watch things off-air from my video/DVD collection in addition to downloaded content. I suspect that most of the population of the UK would find it difficult to go any length of time without access to a TV with an aerial. Same goes for lots of them in regard to access to a mobile phone with text messaging. Actually, amongst poorer people in the UK, treatment for "pointless mobile phone use complex" probably would save them some money if nothing else.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
hook ya up to a turbine or something.
Reminds me of the "test" if you need the Guardian's religion in Ultima 7. No matter how you answered the questions, there would be something wrong with you. E.g., if your mother and a small child are drowning, and you can save only one, who do you save? If you chose the child, you obviously are nuts, if you didn't choose the child you obviously are nuts.
Well, ok, maybe this one isn't in the same way, but it's broad enough to make a large chunk of the population "sick" even if they don't have a computer at all.
E.g., difficulty concentrating? Well, after working some 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, I would imagine that a lot of Chinese are rather too tired to really concentrate on much. Trouble sleeping? Well, too many worries will do the same to you. Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
People tend to have rather nostalgic and idealized notions of the land of their birth/youth. It's usually irrational. Anyway, I'm guessing that you hail from a very modern and urbanized part of China, where the differences with the western world would not be as stark (The building in the west being smaller for example.)
Perhaps you could enlighten us with your own experiences of life in the Chinese rural provinces?
People forget that China's industrial boom, colossal as it is, has not actually affected most of the country or the population. 800 million people have been left behind over the course of the boom. The wealth and indeed to some extent freedoms enjoyed by the urban populations have most certainly not been extended to the vast majority of Chinese citizens. These people are not even allowed to live and work where they want to, essentially needed a chit from local officials to so much as rent an apartment. If that's not oppression, I don't know what is.
So please remember that China is a colossal country, and while you may have experienced little or no oppression in your own small and modernized corner, that does not mean that your experience is universal. When people in the west complain about lack of human rights and freedoms, it is largely the rights of the poor majority which they are referring to.
Now, your experience shows that life is getting better in China, and to be fair, there has been much improvement in the quality of life for many. But there has been little or no improvement in the political and other freedoms in China. Freedoms that people should enjoy, regardless of any ethos of consent. It is true that the communist party of China is in a difficult position, but even still they have made inexcusably little effort to give Chinese people the rights they should enjoy. They might be afraid of another July 4th, but if they don't release pressure by granting rights, then they will end up with another whether they like it or not.
May the Maths Be with you!