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US Students Suffering From Internet Addiction
goG sends in a piece from IBTimes on the latest study to confirm what is becoming pretty obvious. The article mentions the Internet addiction rehab center we discussed last year. "American college students are hooked on cellphones, social media and the Internet and showing symptoms similar to drug and alcohol addictions, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Maryland who asked 200 students to give up all media for one full day found that after 24 hours many showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their media and social links. ... 'Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,' wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. 'When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.'"
'Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,' wrote one of the students, who blogged about their reactions. 'When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life.' I just thought it was a bit ironic to blog about one's Internet addiction
People today are broken and oversocialized, and more importantly, too careful. The anonymity of the internet coupled with its ability to let people "construct" their image of self that others perceive; take that away, and people are afraid of communicating with others.
Of course, not with close friends, but you can look at how people in a bus or a subway will stare at the floor and try their best not to make eye contact.
No, the Internet is not addictive. Nor is texting.
Certain people are obsessive/compulsive.
Inability to function without social links? You take anyone's friends away and they'll get lonely and anxious. For a lot of students, the internet is the only link to old friends and family that they have. Of course they're going to react badly to being isolated.
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I thought for a while that I was "addicted" to the internet. I post to blogs a lot, check my twitter like crazy, check the websites I run like crazy etc. etc.
Then I moved to a new house. Rarely if ever do I even power my computer on while I'm at home now. I'd rather be reading or playing with the dog or riding my bicycle.
It turns out I was just bored.
I think kids have set their standards too high. The internet allows the entire world to compete for their attention. Give them something more interesting to obsess over and they will.
In other words, kids are no more "addicted" to the internet than they were at one point addicted to fishing, or basketball, or any other hobbie that kids have ever had.
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People become sad, annoyed, when not allowed to communicate with their friends. The only thing that has changed here is the mechanism of the communication.
How much will it take to addict me?
How many posts until I have to come back every single day?
When will I start turning down other activities because I have to get back on /.?
Right now, dinner with friends seems a LOT more interesting.
Merchants, immersed in the bustling commerce of Rome, who suddenly found themselves shipwrecked along with a handful of other sailors on some island in the Mediterranean would likely have, "showed signs of withdrawal, craving and anxiety along with an inability to function well without their " ...familiar environment around which their lives had come to revolve.
I would say that it's only an addiction if it's actively interfering with your normal life. That is, your job, your education, your family, and your interpersonal relationships.
I don't use IM'ing and texting as much as I used to (in college) but I still use it. I don't think you can really call these addictions. These are just different forms of communication. I just think they might be overreacting a bit. For example, the comment from one of the students about being secluded... one would feel the same way if they were told not to talk to anyone.
Now if they were whining that they couldn't chat when they were hanging out with their friends... that might be a problem. I think chatting and texting augments social interaction. The problem is when it turns into a substitute. So I'm not saying that internet/text/chatting addiction doesn't exist -- we just have to be careful about defining what internet addiction really is.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
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I think people are generally social. If you took away some other thing you were used to (like your bus ride to work, car, tv set, news paper, friends etc) would it be normal to feel alone and secluded?
I've been using the internet for years and I ain't hooked yet. *clicks refresh repeatedly*
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If you're addicted to "the Internet" ... what do you have to show for it?
Well, personally, I got really into sites like fark (and eventually reddit), but hated a lot of the stuff on them, so I set out to design my own(Although this was the first thing I ever did. A lot of it is very badly designed).
I've since learned CSS, python, javascript (beacuse I wanted to use ajax), mysql, and apache. To further the basketball analogy, I started watching my favorite team on television *all the time* and decided that I wanted to learn to play as well. My first few tries out (like the example linked about) I stumbled a bit, but have since more-or-less figured it out.
Point is, internet isn't all bad, so long as you decide to use it as a tool to educate yourself.
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An amazing discovery! Most people like to interact socially with other people, are comforted by being able to talk to people they know and trust, and feel alone and secluded when they do not! I can't believe research hasn't figured that out yet, who would've ever guessed?
Social interaction with one's friends is still interaction. Technology may make it easier, but that's always been true. Before we had the Internet, people would use telephones to talk, or to plan face to face meetings (and probably use their cars to get to said meetings). The presence of technology in a social interaction doesn't make it any less of one, nor does that mean it's "addictive"-well, any more than any other form anyway, by and large, we're pretty social creatures.
That's even before you get to the fact that removing just about anything familiar from someone's environment will, to some degree, make them anxious. For some people, even getting a new home can be very stressful-you have to learn new ways around, find the places near you that you'll be going frequently and remember the way there, get used to the new layout for going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and all those other little things we take for granted. This isn't exactly groundbreaking research, and it sure in the hell doesn't demonstrate an "addiction".
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People addicted to telephone's are showing increasing signs of not coping well without them. A receptionist said, "My whole day revolves around the telephone, I don't know what I'd do without one."
This addiction isn't just limited to the classic call center stereotype. Formally normal people like businessmen have gone to extraordinary lengths to satisfy their cravings, "I have a phone I carry everywhere with me, I just find it so hard to be out of touch with the office. I even have the car wired so that I can talk while driving between meetings."
A guy who provides alarmist quotes for a living told me, "This telephone craze is destroying the very fabric of society, it's a completely abnormal form of communication. People have no idea of your facial expression is or how your gesticulating with your hands. Eventually we will all evolve to just talking with our hands in our pockets, then how will you know who the Italians are!"
It's vital that we develop treatement plans to assist people in transitioning to a phone free lifestyle, fortunately some profiteering fearmongers have stepped up to the plate. Initial treatement involves lying in a hospital bed with the comfort of the occasional ringing phone in the nurses station, eventually patients progress to walks in a phone free park. The problem is so bad and phones so addicting however that family and friends are smuggling specially designed "mobile" phones into patients, despite clear signs preventing phone use in the area.
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Suffer from internet addiction? No! I *enjoy* it, and you'll take my shiny inter-tubes away from me only when you pry them from my cold, dead, cheeto-dust covered fingers!
SSC
Study shows breaking from routine and habits to be psychologically challenging.
More news at 11.
I can go cold turkey fine.
Just give me a six-pack or two and I can drink my way through any Internet withdrawal.
I am anarch of all I survey.
The conclusion isn't that people are addicted to the internet.
The conclusion is that technologically-aided communication has replaced more traditional forms of communication for many young people, and if you remove their preferred method of communication, they are not able to fall back on other methods of communication, at least not in the short term.
Other things that might make me sad and annoyed:
- Having to watch TV without a DVR
- Having to walk to places I would normally drive to
- Having to answer the phone before knowing whether it's my mother calling or not.
This doesn't make me addicted to DVRs, cars, or caller ID.
paintball
If you're addicted to "the Internet" ... what do you have to show for it?
Knowledge. Thanks to the internet, I can program in a multitude of languages. I can play five different instruments. I can understand three languages. I've had the opportunity to read many classic novels I wouldn't have otherwise. Same with movies. I can make a lot more meals I wouldn't have otherwise been able too. I can fascinate/bore friends with useless trivia.
And I can masturbate like a racehorse on speed.
The "study" (by a journalism professor?) is so fatally flawed that I'm keeping this for as test question for my methodology students.
The discomfort is cognitive dissonance, and it happens whenever someone's expectations are violated, in this case a change in accustom routine. That makes this 'new' study firmly in with the other work that have supported Festinger's theory since he wrote it in 1958.
The same people who brought you video game addiction, pinball addiction And such are behind this bogus definition. They're the same ones who stand to make money treating the 'problem'.
WTF is IBTimes and why is someone dragging bad science out of it to post here? Only to skewer it, I hope, because that's about all that's going to happen.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
In other news, Homo sapiens is discovered to be a social animal which suffers from adverse psychological effects when their primary method of communicating with their peers is removed. News at 11.
They are missing the communication with fellow humans, and the feeling of connectedness, knowing what's going on. You could do a study in which older folks try to avoid talking to anyone at all for a day, and try to also avoid any kind of information intake (newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.) and probably get similar results.
Reminds me of the hue and cry when I was a kid about how grocery stores got so dependent on barcode scanners and cash registers that they couldn't sell stuff at all if the power went out. Apparently in my parents' day they would have gotten by with a pad of paper and a pencil in that kind of situation.
Of course doing without the net once in a while might be good as a survival exercise, kindof like power outage preparedness...
How is this different from normally talking to people?. Ill bet that 90% of people at my school would have a nervous breakdown if they couldn't talk to people. This is simply a different way of talking and expressing yourself.
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People today are broken and oversocialized, and more importantly, too careful...people "construct" their image of self that others perceive
Too careful? They 'construct' the image others see? Do you read the kind of crap people plaster all over Facebook? The ridiculous, copious honesty of those people is exactly why I don't use social media at all. Between the disgusting, the bizarre, and (this is most of it) the completely boring, there's no frickin end to the completely true, unedited drivel oozing all over these social networking venues. There's a difference between open, honest dialogue and telling everything about everything, and these people by and large passed that line five years ago.
Too careful couldn't be more wrong; social networkers have become so completely unfiltered the entirety of cyberspace overflows with their useless raw data.
It's not people developing Internet and gadget addiction, but sociophobes finally reaching out. They've been here all along, but lacked both the skills and the means to socialize. Now they have the means. The skills will hopefully develop. It's only surprising to see how many of them there are.