Does it matter how we loose ourselves, online, in books, in a crowd or by watching TV? When we don't pay the bills we will still end up homeless. The number of ways to escape is growing day by day. With every one of them there is going to be a majority of people that will be just fine. Some are not. Some people will flunk school, get fired and evicted because there's something taking up way too much of their time. Some people just need to loose themselves for whatever reason. I have a friend who uses drugs and I myself sat locked up in a musty apartment for two years with a 14.4 modem. By choice. She hasn't found a reason to quit poisoning her body and I didn't find any reasons to go for a walk in the park. Some people have a need to loose themselves. It isn't until that need subsides they end up with and addiction they will want to get rid of. If your habits are stealing time from other things you'd rather do, if your habits prevents you from returning books to the library, if your habits are hurting you and others then you are probably addicted (and miserable), and you should seek help if you can't break your habits yourself.
The Yahoo article seems to be a very crude simplification of the findings of those psychologists. To establish if a person is addicted to something you need to know more than just the usage (of the something). How many hours you are connected to the Internet is just a tool to indicate a possible addiction. It is not what determines the diagnosis. It's the reporter that needs to be put under scrutiny rather than the psychologists. The language of the article is rather provocative (kind of like the author is trying to ridicule them psycologists).
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Does it matter how we loose ourselves, online, in books, in a crowd or by watching TV? When we don't pay the bills we will still end up homeless. The number of ways to escape is growing day by day. With every one of them there is going to be a majority of people that will be just fine.
Some are not. Some people will flunk school, get fired and evicted because there's something taking up way too much of their time. Some people just need to loose themselves for whatever reason.
I have a friend who uses drugs and I myself sat locked up in a musty apartment for two years with a 14.4 modem. By choice.
She hasn't found a reason to quit poisoning her body and I didn't find any reasons to go for a walk in the park.
Some people have a need to loose themselves. It isn't until that need subsides they end up with and addiction they will want to get rid of.
If your habits are stealing time from other things you'd rather do, if your habits prevents you from returning books to the library, if your habits are hurting you and others then you are probably addicted (and miserable), and you should seek help if you can't break your habits yourself.
The Yahoo article seems to be a very crude simplification of the findings of those psychologists. To establish if a person is addicted to something you need to know more than just the usage (of the something). How many hours you are connected to the Internet is just a tool to indicate a possible addiction. It is not what determines the diagnosis.
It's the reporter that needs to be put under scrutiny rather than the psychologists. The language of the article is rather provocative (kind of like the author is trying to ridicule them psycologists).
Tina.