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Outside Beijing, a Military-style Bootcamp For "Internet Addiction"
Press2ToContinue writes Last year, China recognized internet addiction as an official disorder. Since then, over 6,000 patients have submitted themselves for treatment, after some spent up to 14 hours a day online. And as these amazing pictures show, dealing with it is serious. The Daxing Internet Addiction Treatment Centre (IATC) is a military-style bootcamp nestled in the suburbs of Bejing. The young men that enter its doors are subjected to a strict military regime of exercise, medication and solitary confinement. Any kind of electronic gadgetry is completely banned. Additionally, patients are frequently subjected to psychiatric assessments and brain scans to make sure they stay on the straight and narrow. And the concept is gaining steam; the first Internet Congress on Internet Addiction Disorders was held in Milan in early 2014. Despite its recent official classification, Is internet addiction a real disorder? Or is it a red herring masking depression and escapism? And to make things more indeterminate, Isn't more and more time online the inevitable future?
That is certainly true, and you do not even need to be in China for that. Most smart, perceptive people will develop an intense dislike for the way this installment of the human race is behaving in short order.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That's not a disorder in the sense that the average person means it though. In some ways this is similar to all those stupid "X with a computer" patents, in that somehow people think that adding a computer into the equation makes it magically different. Obsessive compulsive behavior already is a disorder, and is entirely different from what people usually mean when they talk about "internet addiction." The internet, and anything associated with it, be that "excessive" gaming or Facebook or whatever, are at most a symptom of something else. There is no inherent chemical dependency involved any more than with any other activity.
If anything, this gets scapegoated by many people because it does not fit the old norms of human society. If those same youths were obsessively studying for schoolwork all day long, it would not elicit nearly the same reaction. If they spent their entire day socializing with friends in person, would anyone be surprised?
As for the definition of online versus offline, that's a somewhat tricky distinction to make. It would be safer to say that in an increasingly connected world it will be harder to find anything that is "completely offline" unless you specifically seek it out - but, again, it's not like there's some ethernet port in my body that I plug a cable into that's delivering euphoric sensations I'm addicted to.
Back in the day when I was a pupil I had "library addiction" for several years. I spent most of my free time in the library reading books.
If you were reading books, that's completely different.
However, if you had been going to the library to stare at the same page of your year book day after day pining over a classmate you had a crush on, or going to the library only to hide behind a bookshelf staring at your crush while she's studying with her boyfriend, that would be a closer analogue to what people do on the internet nowadays.
First, your statement "there is no inherent chemical dependency involved any more than with any other activity", although prima facie true, as the neurological basis of psychological habituation is fairly-well understood and the same mechanisms are involved. However, this facile statement hides the fact that people become psychologically habituated to certain activities to varying degrees - saying that the mechanism is the same simplifies OCD into nail biting, even though treatment in each case would be completely different.
Second, this disregard of severity of psychological habituation (I'll call it PH for brevity from here on out) seems to be matched by a notion that a communication medium has no bearing on how well material delivered through that medium can reinforce behavior, leading to astonishing statement "people think that adding a computer into the equation makes it magically different"! This is astonishing mainly because by trying to be sarcastic, you've actually stumbled upon the truth: Different mediums for reinforcement DO lead to different levels of reinforcement. Each medium provides a different experience - aesthetic experience, information content, activity levels, etc., etc., etc. In fact, it would be pretty fucking amazing if a new communications medium did not reinforce particular behaviors very well.
Finally, it's odd that you see the internet as a neutral distribution medium. The atomized and fragmented nature of the internet makes it a lovely market for short, facile responses such as yours. It eschews long form thought and substitutes trope. In many ways, twitch response is a perfect metaphor for the internet - all reaction, no thought. And FPS games take this to a new level - all reaction, no thought, pretty much all the time. It is no surprise that you come to the defence of games as it is a perfect avatar for you. Your inability to achieve even shallow thought, coupled with nothing but sarcasm and a few common rhetorical tricks are the perfect prestidigitation for our commonly awful internet age. I fully expect to see you up-modded here.
P.S. I normally don't swat at flies. But in this case, you gamesters are all swarming around a decaying corpse that you helped devour. Get the fuck out of the way so smart people can perform an autopsy.
That is all.