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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.
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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.
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...
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.
So if my blackberry is constantly connected to the internet and it's on 24/7, I guess that means
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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
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)
You make a good point that not *all* addictions are true "addictions", but it's a point we already know.
All addictions are psychological addictions so anything that makes you feel good ends up rewiring your brain (this is why you constantly think about what you are addicted to, your brain is looking for ways to feel good again) - and hence your brain rebels against you when you try to quit (it literally becomes a civil war inside your head). So its not really a matter of what are "real" addictions - they are all real because you make them real - even if to the outside observer there looks to be no addictive component.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Furthermore, all habits involve rewiring of neural circuitry. Some drug habits induce a physiological dependence, which is not to imply that psychological dependence is not physiological, but rather than psychological dependence does not involve the body going into a sort of shock. Take a person off of heroin cold turkey, and there is the possibility of death.
Regardless of the type of addiction, every addiction is a function of the lack of volition. It can be theorized that this is the result of a weakened cingulate gyrus which has been posited as a potential "seat of volition" within the brain.
Regardless of the neuro-correlates, we are responsible for our decisions. And if we fail at being responsible, we are responsible for making ourselves responsible for our decisions.
Furthermore, it is important to take context into consideration when identifying a pathology. Social structures exist that may in themselves be responsible for pathological behaviors, and in some cases, pathological behaviors may not be pathological but entirely adaptive. This does not change the diagnosis of a disorder (which is based entirely on symptomatology and has nothing to do with etiology), but it does bear significance.
That is all
hook ya up to a turbine or something.