6 ms·

Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder (1996) [pdf]

81 points by flannery 5y ago

cloudengineer94 5y ago
I have been giving a lot of thoughts into this for quite a few years now. A few years ago I went on a trip and ended up staying at a friend's house where he didn't any internet connection. There was Mobile Data available but where I was it was very expensive due to the data cap being 1GB at the time. Anyhow, being disconnected for like 3 days in a row felt like a drug user without their "fix". There was no way to connect to the internet so I could watch either news or talk to my loved ones via Skype (now you can see how many years ago this was) or just play some online game. It was a weird experience because after those 3 days it felt like I was in a coma, I was completely disconnected of everything that was going around having only the local newspaper in the nearby town to what was happening, and since it was just local/national news I had no idea what was happening in my home country. At the end of those holidays I ended up taking away that it's odd having your personal life and work life (I work remote) relying always on being "connected". Not just odd but it does feel like people who are used to it feel different once we don't have it anymore.
- kypro 5y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if the tech withdrawal people experience is more related to the inconvenience of not having tech like smart phones and computers, rather than an actual addiction. For example, when my car is at the garage I feel like I'm going through a kind of drug withdrawal. It really bothers that I can't just jump in my car and go somewhere and instead I now need to catch a bus or walk. Before having a car this would have been normal to me, but am I now addicted to my car or is it more that having a car is really convenient and now I'm experience the inconvenience of not having access to one? Similarly, when I'm home I rarely ever use my phone and it will often run out of battery without me noticing until I want to set my morning alarm before bed. But when I'm out of the house I get really stressed when my phone is low on battery or flat. Again, I don't think I'm addicted it's just annoying that I can't easily order a taxi or map my way to some place I need to go without a phone. Having a phone is an extremely useful tool when you're out of the house. I'm not denying some people have addictions, but I wonder why in general we don't see our relationship with other technologies in a similar way. Am I addicted to electric lights and central heating? When does a recognising and appreciating the connivance of a technology -- perhaps even to the point where you can't imagine living without it -- become an addiction? If it's having a negative impact your life then I get it, but recently there seems to be a push to label anyway -- even kids -- who simply enjoy using tech as "addicts".
  - throwamon 5y ago
    If you spent over half your day watching cat videos and posting low-effort Hacker News comments and the other half feeling bad for doing it, you wouldn't be wondering that.
    - kypro 5y ago
      I wasn't denying that people can be addicted to the internet, my comment was in response to whether what the parent commenter was saying is even that analogous to addiction. Internet addiction is a term that seems to get thrown around a lot these days, especially at kids and teens, but I think what people tend to label internet addiction isn't really an addiction at all or even directly damaging -- it's just people understandably wanting to take advantage of having access to the internet and smart phones to stay connected to friends or to entertain themselves. If it gets to the point where kids aren't doing school work, or if an adult rather play video games than get a job, then sure that's a problem. But if a guy likes to come home from work and spend 80% of his evening catching up with friends on Facebook and playing video games I don't think that's an any less valid way to spend an evening than say reading a fiction book. And again, we don't accuse people who spend most of their free time reading sci-fi books as being addicts, even if taking their sci-fi books from them would send them into a state of withdrawal while they found something else to replace their reading "addiction" with.
      - Mezzie 5y ago
        > Again, we don't accuse people who spend most of their free time reading sci-fi books as being addicts, even if taking their sci-fi books from them would send them into a state of withdrawal while they found something else to replace their reading "addiction" with. Parents and adults did do this back in the 90s, at least to me. I read books when I didn't have computer access and both were considered 'problems'. I had books taken away and was forbidden from reading because I would rather do that than socialize. I know I'm not the only one either.
        alexvoda 5y ago
- indigochill 5y ago
  That's an interesting anecdote compared to my experience disappearing to a cottage in northern Finland for a few days. At home I spend -way- too many hours on the computer pretty much constantly. But when I went to the cottage, I forgot about all of that and I was just in the moment. Admittedly I was with someone I was interested in and we were basically always out doing something, which is a different experience than when I go visit family and there are long stretches where I'm left to my own devices (at which point I usually go back to a computer), so maybe the social engagement (and how we fill lack thereof with internet connectivity?) is the common factor?
- 323 5y ago
  Some cognitive scientists are saying that smartphones are extensions of our mind/body now, so taking them away is like taking away the artificial limb of an amputee - it makes you feel incapacitated. Some go further, and say that taking away smartphones from prisoners for example could be classified as psychological torture.
  - bumby 5y ago
    Are there any citations to back up those claims?
h2odragon 5y ago
There was a time when the impact of Novels (fiction books) on young women's health was a topic of hot debate. When this "Internet addiction" label got pasted onto the same old "be scared of the new fad" it coincided with Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign and sought tailwind from the term "addiction"; oddly just as "addiction by prescription" began its meteoric rise. Nor should we forget all the Internet Sex Predators; small town sheriffs all over the country getting their rocks of role playing then busting their playmates when they need a news story. That movement drew some of the worst elements of our society into just exactly the positions of power we didn't need them to be. Many are still there, i think.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I remember when this article came out. I was 8 and definitely fit the criteria and have ever since, but for some reason it's not a 'problem' anymore since now everybody has internet access to the point where it becomes logistically difficult if you DON'T for whatever reason. Instead of "Mez is a weirdo who spends all of her time online", now it's "Oh, ask Mez [about whatever thing they heard online], she'll know what's going on." Now the "problem" is TikTok/"the algorithm". Which, don't get me wrong, algorithmic discovery and content provision have issues, but a lot of the panic is non techy people just not understanding something new. I'm sure in 10 years we'll be panicking about something else.
  - bumby 5y ago
    All of that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily negate the article claims of professional and social impairment. It just normalizes that behavior.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      The claims are missing an important variable when trying to determine if a behavior is harmful: The social context of that behavior. In the context of the 90s (and especially for adults), spending too much time online was, in some ways, an inherently anti-social act: You had to be physically tethered to the machine, often monopolizing the only other of long-distance communication available (the landline phone line) for the entire house, and, when people and households shared computers, it often meant others COULDN'T use the tool. In 2021, none of that is true. Also, there were certain cultural ideas about what types of 'socializing'/'friends' counted as well as what constituted 'normal' behavior. It's entirely possible Internet addiction is real and this article is interesting as one of the first to mention such a thing, but the Internet and Web just hadn't been embedded into society well enough to be evaluated.
nobody0 5y ago
Probably we also have backpressure as a information receivers and the tube obviously does not care about that.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
A young friend in medical school around 1996 was one of the first to diagnose 'Internet Addiction' in a student at the UofIowa. Missing classes, forgetting to eat, losing sleep, all classic addictive symptoms? I don't know why folks are dissing this; disfunction is disfunction.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I think it's because it's not possible to know if that would have happened without the internet and therefore causality hasn't been established. Like if someone is self-harming, is the problem the tool or the fact that they're self-harming? Such a person might have ended up isolating themselves to watch TV, or read, or other things. I've done all of the above with books and television. In which case the issue may be information availability offering people a new option: It's a lot easier to ignore the world and read 500 books in a row if I can download them all without leaving my house and there's no check to go 'is this a good idea?' If the issue is information availability, blocking the internet/social media will do nothing. Think streaming Netflix for hours versus flipping through TV on the 90s: You'd stop flipping if nothing interested you, but on Netflix there's ALWAYS something.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Isn't that just describing 'Internet Addiction' with more detail?
motohagiography 5y ago
> Dependents spent a M = 38.5, SD = 8.04 hours per week compared to Non-Dependents who spent M= 4.9, SD = 4.70 hours per week. Rookie numbers.
- teekert 5y ago
  Came here to read exactly this comment, thanx for not letting me down.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  I spend around 12 (sometimes 48) hours a day on the Internet. 8.04 hours per week is nothing... ~1 hour per day. That is nothing.
  - cristoperb 5y ago
    It's 38.5 hours per week (with a standard deviation of 8.04 hours). Still doesn't sound like too much today.
    - johnisgood 5y ago
      Oh sorry, my bad! Still, that does not sound much either.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  The SF is the standard deviation. The dependent group was spending 5.5 hours a day. Though I probably spend over 24 glowing rectangles-hours per day, soooo… https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing-re-1819570829 https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-sta...
  - Jensson 5y ago
    An average white collar worker today probably spends more than that just doing their job.
- 5y ago
sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago
oh dang, so hmmm
- lostlogin 5y ago
  You’re summoning the mod?
  - throwamon 5y ago
    Probably as in "dang take the wheel"
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
code4money 5y ago
Not recognized in the USA as a DSM disorder. Probably because insurance companies don’t want to pay for treatment for that many affected.
freewilly1040 5y ago
One of those old scares which seems a little quaint now, not because the fears were unfounded, but because the feared thing came to pass and is normal. Similar to old fears that family time would turn into TV time.
- toto444 5y ago
  Back in 2009 some French website wrote an article about a man they call Marc L and they showed they were able to tell a very big chunk of his private life based on what he had posted on the internet. At the time everyone was shocked after reading this article. Nowadays everyone's life is out there on Instagram, FB, YT, ... Just an other of these feared things that came to pass and are now normal. Link to the article (in French) : http://www.le-tigre.net/marc-l.html http://www.le-tigre.net/marc-l.html
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  And in the meantime suicide and depression keep climbing
  - OneTimePetes 5y ago
    Yes, but the source of that is not the symptom.
  - xorfish 5y ago
    Suicide rates worldwide have been consistently dropping. The same is true for Europe. The US is an outlier, the suicide rate has increased by 10% between 1996 and 2017. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide https://ourworldindata.org/suicide I'm not sure that there is comparable data available for depression since our understanding of it has changed over the last 30 years and getting consistent data is very difficult.
    - DanBC 5y ago
      Our World in Data is not a suitable source for suicide statistics, especially if you're comparing different countries across time. They don't tell you what populations they're using; they don't tell you how these different countries are counting suicide; they don't tell you whether the methods for counting have changed over time in these countries.
vertere 5y ago
Related episode of Build For Tomorrow (formerly Pessimists Archive) podcast: https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addicted-to-technology https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addi...
keithnz 5y ago
I remember when this came out originally.... IRC addiction was quite common at that stage. Was a good age, when people enjoyed the novelty of being able to make friends all around the world.
bigger_inside 5y ago
Have we collectively forgotten that Ivan Goldberg coined this term as a joke? It was also an ironic commentary on the overreach of addiction metaphors to encompass everything that existing social structures, especially established structures of productivity and wealth extraction, found disruptive. In that sense, the advent of "internet addiction" as a frame of reference was also part of the internet moral panic, which itself was just another iteration of all technology panics that have accompanied every shift in communication technologies, including the TV, movies, radio, novels, and book printing (which was the original fake news panic). So, grain of salt.
- throwamon 5y ago
  "Internet addiction" doesn't strike me as a particularly unique expression, so I doubt he was the only one to come up with it. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it before I first thought of myself as "computer-addicted" when I was a child, before I even knew what the Internet was (and then, soon enough, I would see myself as "Internet-addicted" as well).
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    It was talked about, but this was either the first or one of the first academic articles to mention it, if I recall correctly (I may not). Similar to how discussions about how to save things online bubbled up before IA was established or there were a lot of talks about what made a webpage valuable before Google and Page Rank came on to the scene. Lots of collective consciousness going on.
- grkvlt 5y ago
  I hadn't heard this before, and was curious (especially since the paper being discussed is from 1996, 25 years ago) so I did a quick Google to see what was out there. This paper [0] describes how Goldberg first mentioned the idea on the PsyCom BBS (which he founded) in 1995, apparently as a response to his issues with the DSM IV, which had just been published the year before. So, I learned that today - thanks, 'bigger_inside ;) 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776584/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776584/
the-dude 5y ago
Average TV hours / day for the US : https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio... 2014 : 4.20 hours / day 2020 : 3.33 hours / day
- boppo1 5y ago
  Do they have one for 'general non-work screen time'?
jcun4128 5y ago
When I lose internet I remember that I live alone/don't have much else to do. Will hopefully change at some point but yeah. I always have some form of noise on.
sidcool 5y ago
What's the solution to internet addiction? It's only seeming to get worse.
- zeta0134 5y ago
  I definitely recommend checking out your local public library, or going for a long walk in a nearby park. Don't take your phone. Allow yourself to be bored. Let your mind wander. Once you get over the weird feeling, and the anxiousness of not knowing what's been happening, you'll likely find that your mind amuses itself. I have a sneaky suspicion that relaxing in this way and encouraging that mental wandering grants some sort of benefit, though I can't put my finger on what exactly. When I come home I'm always refreshed, and the next day often eager to get started on some idea I had while out and about. If I take a news feed with me, I miss out on this experience and, over time, seem to find myself drained of energy. Same if I compulsively check that feed the moment I get back home. A proper disconnect once in a while seems to work wonders. It's like... being constantly connected all the time is over stimulating somehow, without realizing it in the moment.
  - sabellito 5y ago
    Your advice to the comment, sadly, amounts to someone telling a drug addict to "just not use drugs", or a depressed person to "just go outside".
    - zeta0134 5y ago
      Ah, perhaps it has been misinterpreted. That was not my intent. "Take occasional breaks, they seem to help" was the goal, not "stop entirely and never start again."
      - throwamon 5y ago
        Taking occasional breaks may be worse from an addiction point of view. Relevant Sapolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muJ0e9bvcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muJ0e9bvcI

81 points by flannery 5y ago

I have been giving a lot of thoughts into this for quite a few years now. A few years ago I went on a trip and ended up staying at a friend's house where he didn't any internet connection. There was Mobile Data available but where I was it was very expensive due to the data cap being 1GB at the time. Anyhow, being disconnected for like 3 days in a row felt like a drug user without their "fix". There was no way to connect to the internet so I could watch either news or talk to my loved ones via Skype (now you can see how many years ago this was) or just play some online game. It was a weird experience because after those 3 days it felt like I was in a coma, I was completely disconnected of everything that was going around having only the local newspaper in the nearby town to what was happening, and since it was just local/national news I had no idea what was happening in my home country. At the end of those holidays I ended up taking away that it's odd having your personal life and work life (I work remote) relying always on being "connected". Not just odd but it does feel like people who are used to it feel different once we don't have it anymore.

kypro 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if the tech withdrawal people experience is more related to the inconvenience of not having tech like smart phones and computers, rather than an actual addiction. For example, when my car is at the garage I feel like I'm going through a kind of drug withdrawal. It really bothers that I can't just jump in my car and go somewhere and instead I now need to catch a bus or walk. Before having a car this would have been normal to me, but am I now addicted to my car or is it more that having a car is really convenient and now I'm experience the inconvenience of not having access to one? Similarly, when I'm home I rarely ever use my phone and it will often run out of battery without me noticing until I want to set my morning alarm before bed. But when I'm out of the house I get really stressed when my phone is low on battery or flat. Again, I don't think I'm addicted it's just annoying that I can't easily order a taxi or map my way to some place I need to go without a phone. Having a phone is an extremely useful tool when you're out of the house. I'm not denying some people have addictions, but I wonder why in general we don't see our relationship with other technologies in a similar way. Am I addicted to electric lights and central heating? When does a recognising and appreciating the connivance of a technology -- perhaps even to the point where you can't imagine living without it -- become an addiction? If it's having a negative impact your life then I get it, but recently there seems to be a push to label anyway -- even kids -- who simply enjoy using tech as "addicts".
- throwamon 5y ago
  If you spent over half your day watching cat videos and posting low-effort Hacker News comments and the other half feeling bad for doing it, you wouldn't be wondering that.
  - kypro 5y ago
    I wasn't denying that people can be addicted to the internet, my comment was in response to whether what the parent commenter was saying is even that analogous to addiction. Internet addiction is a term that seems to get thrown around a lot these days, especially at kids and teens, but I think what people tend to label internet addiction isn't really an addiction at all or even directly damaging -- it's just people understandably wanting to take advantage of having access to the internet and smart phones to stay connected to friends or to entertain themselves. If it gets to the point where kids aren't doing school work, or if an adult rather play video games than get a job, then sure that's a problem. But if a guy likes to come home from work and spend 80% of his evening catching up with friends on Facebook and playing video games I don't think that's an any less valid way to spend an evening than say reading a fiction book. And again, we don't accuse people who spend most of their free time reading sci-fi books as being addicts, even if taking their sci-fi books from them would send them into a state of withdrawal while they found something else to replace their reading "addiction" with.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      > Again, we don't accuse people who spend most of their free time reading sci-fi books as being addicts, even if taking their sci-fi books from them would send them into a state of withdrawal while they found something else to replace their reading "addiction" with. Parents and adults did do this back in the 90s, at least to me. I read books when I didn't have computer access and both were considered 'problems'. I had books taken away and was forbidden from reading because I would rather do that than socialize. I know I'm not the only one either.
      - alexvoda 5y ago
indigochill 5y ago
That's an interesting anecdote compared to my experience disappearing to a cottage in northern Finland for a few days. At home I spend -way- too many hours on the computer pretty much constantly. But when I went to the cottage, I forgot about all of that and I was just in the moment. Admittedly I was with someone I was interested in and we were basically always out doing something, which is a different experience than when I go visit family and there are long stretches where I'm left to my own devices (at which point I usually go back to a computer), so maybe the social engagement (and how we fill lack thereof with internet connectivity?) is the common factor?
323 5y ago
Some cognitive scientists are saying that smartphones are extensions of our mind/body now, so taking them away is like taking away the artificial limb of an amputee - it makes you feel incapacitated. Some go further, and say that taking away smartphones from prisoners for example could be classified as psychological torture.
- bumby 5y ago
  Are there any citations to back up those claims?

h2odragon 5y ago

There was a time when the impact of Novels (fiction books) on young women's health was a topic of hot debate. When this "Internet addiction" label got pasted onto the same old "be scared of the new fad" it coincided with Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign and sought tailwind from the term "addiction"; oddly just as "addiction by prescription" began its meteoric rise. Nor should we forget all the Internet Sex Predators; small town sheriffs all over the country getting their rocks of role playing then busting their playmates when they need a news story. That movement drew some of the worst elements of our society into just exactly the positions of power we didn't need them to be. Many are still there, i think.

Mezzie 5y ago
I remember when this article came out. I was 8 and definitely fit the criteria and have ever since, but for some reason it's not a 'problem' anymore since now everybody has internet access to the point where it becomes logistically difficult if you DON'T for whatever reason. Instead of "Mez is a weirdo who spends all of her time online", now it's "Oh, ask Mez [about whatever thing they heard online], she'll know what's going on." Now the "problem" is TikTok/"the algorithm". Which, don't get me wrong, algorithmic discovery and content provision have issues, but a lot of the panic is non techy people just not understanding something new. I'm sure in 10 years we'll be panicking about something else.
- bumby 5y ago
  All of that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily negate the article claims of professional and social impairment. It just normalizes that behavior.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    The claims are missing an important variable when trying to determine if a behavior is harmful: The social context of that behavior. In the context of the 90s (and especially for adults), spending too much time online was, in some ways, an inherently anti-social act: You had to be physically tethered to the machine, often monopolizing the only other of long-distance communication available (the landline phone line) for the entire house, and, when people and households shared computers, it often meant others COULDN'T use the tool. In 2021, none of that is true. Also, there were certain cultural ideas about what types of 'socializing'/'friends' counted as well as what constituted 'normal' behavior. It's entirely possible Internet addiction is real and this article is interesting as one of the first to mention such a thing, but the Internet and Web just hadn't been embedded into society well enough to be evaluated.

nobody0 5y ago

Probably we also have backpressure as a information receivers and the tube obviously does not care about that.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

A young friend in medical school around 1996 was one of the first to diagnose 'Internet Addiction' in a student at the UofIowa. Missing classes, forgetting to eat, losing sleep, all classic addictive symptoms? I don't know why folks are dissing this; disfunction is disfunction.

Mezzie 5y ago
I think it's because it's not possible to know if that would have happened without the internet and therefore causality hasn't been established. Like if someone is self-harming, is the problem the tool or the fact that they're self-harming? Such a person might have ended up isolating themselves to watch TV, or read, or other things. I've done all of the above with books and television. In which case the issue may be information availability offering people a new option: It's a lot easier to ignore the world and read 500 books in a row if I can download them all without leaving my house and there's no check to go 'is this a good idea?' If the issue is information availability, blocking the internet/social media will do nothing. Think streaming Netflix for hours versus flipping through TV on the 90s: You'd stop flipping if nothing interested you, but on Netflix there's ALWAYS something.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  Isn't that just describing 'Internet Addiction' with more detail?

motohagiography 5y ago

> Dependents spent a M = 38.5, SD = 8.04 hours per week compared to Non-Dependents who spent M= 4.9, SD = 4.70 hours per week. Rookie numbers.

teekert 5y ago
Came here to read exactly this comment, thanx for not letting me down.
johnisgood 5y ago
I spend around 12 (sometimes 48) hours a day on the Internet. 8.04 hours per week is nothing... ~1 hour per day. That is nothing.
- cristoperb 5y ago
  It's 38.5 hours per week (with a standard deviation of 8.04 hours). Still doesn't sound like too much today.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    Oh sorry, my bad! Still, that does not sound much either.
Scoundreller 5y ago
The SF is the standard deviation. The dependent group was spending 5.5 hours a day. Though I probably spend over 24 glowing rectangles-hours per day, soooo… https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing-re-1819570829 https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-sta...
- Jensson 5y ago
  An average white collar worker today probably spends more than that just doing their job.
5y ago

sysOpOpPERAND 5y ago

oh dang, so hmmm

lostlogin 5y ago
You’re summoning the mod?
- throwamon 5y ago
  Probably as in "dang take the wheel"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

code4money 5y ago

Not recognized in the USA as a DSM disorder. Probably because insurance companies don’t want to pay for treatment for that many affected.

freewilly1040 5y ago

One of those old scares which seems a little quaint now, not because the fears were unfounded, but because the feared thing came to pass and is normal. Similar to old fears that family time would turn into TV time.

toto444 5y ago
Back in 2009 some French website wrote an article about a man they call Marc L and they showed they were able to tell a very big chunk of his private life based on what he had posted on the internet. At the time everyone was shocked after reading this article. Nowadays everyone's life is out there on Instagram, FB, YT, ... Just an other of these feared things that came to pass and are now normal. Link to the article (in French) : http://www.le-tigre.net/marc-l.html http://www.le-tigre.net/marc-l.html
s1artibartfast 5y ago
And in the meantime suicide and depression keep climbing
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Yes, but the source of that is not the symptom.
- xorfish 5y ago
  Suicide rates worldwide have been consistently dropping. The same is true for Europe. The US is an outlier, the suicide rate has increased by 10% between 1996 and 2017. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide https://ourworldindata.org/suicide I'm not sure that there is comparable data available for depression since our understanding of it has changed over the last 30 years and getting consistent data is very difficult.
  - DanBC 5y ago
    Our World in Data is not a suitable source for suicide statistics, especially if you're comparing different countries across time. They don't tell you what populations they're using; they don't tell you how these different countries are counting suicide; they don't tell you whether the methods for counting have changed over time in these countries.

vertere 5y ago

Related episode of Build For Tomorrow (formerly Pessimists Archive) podcast: https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addicted-to-technology https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addi...

keithnz 5y ago

I remember when this came out originally.... IRC addiction was quite common at that stage. Was a good age, when people enjoyed the novelty of being able to make friends all around the world.

bigger_inside 5y ago

Have we collectively forgotten that Ivan Goldberg coined this term as a joke? It was also an ironic commentary on the overreach of addiction metaphors to encompass everything that existing social structures, especially established structures of productivity and wealth extraction, found disruptive. In that sense, the advent of "internet addiction" as a frame of reference was also part of the internet moral panic, which itself was just another iteration of all technology panics that have accompanied every shift in communication technologies, including the TV, movies, radio, novels, and book printing (which was the original fake news panic). So, grain of salt.

throwamon 5y ago
"Internet addiction" doesn't strike me as a particularly unique expression, so I doubt he was the only one to come up with it. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it before I first thought of myself as "computer-addicted" when I was a child, before I even knew what the Internet was (and then, soon enough, I would see myself as "Internet-addicted" as well).
- Mezzie 5y ago
  It was talked about, but this was either the first or one of the first academic articles to mention it, if I recall correctly (I may not). Similar to how discussions about how to save things online bubbled up before IA was established or there were a lot of talks about what made a webpage valuable before Google and Page Rank came on to the scene. Lots of collective consciousness going on.
grkvlt 5y ago
I hadn't heard this before, and was curious (especially since the paper being discussed is from 1996, 25 years ago) so I did a quick Google to see what was out there. This paper [0] describes how Goldberg first mentioned the idea on the PsyCom BBS (which he founded) in 1995, apparently as a response to his issues with the DSM IV, which had just been published the year before. So, I learned that today - thanks, 'bigger_inside ;) 0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776584/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776584/

the-dude 5y ago

Average TV hours / day for the US : https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio... 2014 : 4.20 hours / day 2020 : 3.33 hours / day

boppo1 5y ago
Do they have one for 'general non-work screen time'?

jcun4128 5y ago

When I lose internet I remember that I live alone/don't have much else to do. Will hopefully change at some point but yeah. I always have some form of noise on.

sidcool 5y ago

What's the solution to internet addiction? It's only seeming to get worse.

zeta0134 5y ago
I definitely recommend checking out your local public library, or going for a long walk in a nearby park. Don't take your phone. Allow yourself to be bored. Let your mind wander. Once you get over the weird feeling, and the anxiousness of not knowing what's been happening, you'll likely find that your mind amuses itself. I have a sneaky suspicion that relaxing in this way and encouraging that mental wandering grants some sort of benefit, though I can't put my finger on what exactly. When I come home I'm always refreshed, and the next day often eager to get started on some idea I had while out and about. If I take a news feed with me, I miss out on this experience and, over time, seem to find myself drained of energy. Same if I compulsively check that feed the moment I get back home. A proper disconnect once in a while seems to work wonders. It's like... being constantly connected all the time is over stimulating somehow, without realizing it in the moment.
- sabellito 5y ago
  Your advice to the comment, sadly, amounts to someone telling a drug addict to "just not use drugs", or a depressed person to "just go outside".
  - zeta0134 5y ago
    Ah, perhaps it has been misinterpreted. That was not my intent. "Take occasional breaks, they seem to help" was the goal, not "stop entirely and never start again."
    - throwamon 5y ago
      Taking occasional breaks may be worse from an addiction point of view. Relevant Sapolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muJ0e9bvcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2muJ0e9bvcI