Computer Addiction or Just Modern Life?

Ant writes to tell us that ABC News has an interesting look at computer addiction and what it might take to be considered addicted in today's society. From the article: "Video games and the Internet have been subject to suspicion since the computer became a household fixture. One complaint: People get sucked into spending enormous amounts of time on the computer, to the detriment of other parts of their life. But are they addicted? The answer depends on what you mean by 'addicted.' Most experts say computers are not addictive in the same sense that drugs are, but they could be on the same level as gambling."

problem?

problem? problem? i don't have a problem...its valentine's day and i got first post, do you think i have a problem?

Re:problem?

Refresh...Refresh...Refresh...Refresh...Valentine' s what?

This post is a case study.

Note that I am posting this on Valentines day, at 10:30PM instead of spending time with the girlfriend.

Am I addicted? Not in the traditional sense of the word, of course.

Re:This post is a case study.

Note that I am posting this on Valentines day, at 10:30PM instead of spending time with the girlfriend.

... and by girlfriend you mean an actual human female and not a cardboard cut out of Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor? Cause trust me dude I've been down that road.

It's an artificial need.

Just as TV, radio, or telephone.

Is it necessary for survival? Only if the environment forces you to it. The current environment is technologically-driven, so you need to stay connected to have a social life, student life, work life, etc.

The real problem is about people whose life is so miserable that to escape from the world, they use the internet. THEN it becomes an addiction, but I'd say that's the least of their problems.

Depends on how you define needs

For example Maslow would say it is a need, or rather fills a need, that being self actualization. See Maslow thought that the traditonal definition of need, that being the basic things required to sustain life, was too narrow. People seem to need more than that, at least if they are to have a fulfilling life. His thoery was that as you filled more base needs, you moved up to the next level. So physical needs like food and water are first, then shelter and security and so on up. At the very top there is self actualization. That would be anything you find personally fulfilling, be that a something that challenges you, entertains you, enlightens you, whatever.

Well, computers and the Internet sure can do that. Computer games are wonderfully entertaining, at least for some. I find them much more satasfying than TV most of the time. The Internet is an excellent place to get at all sorts of information for no other reason than because you want to.

So I wouldn't say it's an artifical need, it's very real, it's just one that there are many ways to fill, and computers are not a requisite to doing that, just a way of doing it if you like. I don't think they are any less valid than any other method. I don't understand the conception that a family that comes home and watches TV all evening while eating, chatting, etc is "normal" but one that goes and logs on to Warcraft is "addicted".

I'd say computers are just one of the many things we choose to spend time on meeting our highest needs, since our more basic ones are generally quite easily met in rich countries.

ABC News ?

if it's not "Action News" [slashdot.org], it's not worth my time.

How about cars?

Let's see...

Automobile addiction, or just modern life?

Telephone addiction, or just modern life?

Newspaper addiction, or just modern life?

Machine addiction, or just modern life?

Agriculture addiction, or just modern life?

Clothes addiction, or just modern life?

Fire addiction, or just modern life?

Pointy stick addiction, or just modern life?

Hmmmm...

Re:How about cars?

Pointy stick addiction, or just modern life?

I can quit pointy sticks anytime I want. I just don't want to..

Re:How about cars?

Please keep your clothes addiction.

Think of the children.

I'm addicted to shoes, wheels, and toothpaste.

I've used shoes for so long that I'm not sure how well I could live without them. Shaking this addiction would probably cause me physical harm. If I hadn't started using them so much, I probably wouldn't need them so much now.

I'm also psychologically addicted to toothpaste. Even though my body doesn't require it to survive, I don't think I could ever convince myself to stop using it without great pressure.

Computers are a tool, folks. They're used so much because they're a tool for a very wide variety of things. Imagine how much you'd use a car that did fifty other things for you.

It's an addiction

I find myself spending hours every day online. Eventually I reach the point where I realize that the last hour I've spent surfing nothing at all. Just going from site to site looking for something new & interesting to pop up. It is especially bad when you get involved in discussion forums.

I absolutely recognize that it is detrimental to the rest of my life -- I do neglect things that are arguably more important. And I get frustrated sometimes, and seriously consider yanking the cord right out of the wall and throwing the computer in the closet for a few weeks.

It may not be a classic addiction in the physical sense, but I could see it being similar to something like a gambling addiction, as mentioned. I know that I'll sit down at the computer frequently, even when I know there is nothing new to see, because I just looked a few minutes earlier ;). And yet I will do a little surfing anyway.

And that is why I am typing this on Valentine's Day, instead of being out with my non-existent girlfriend.

As opposed to, you know, television.

If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day online, they're "addicted".

If someone spends hours and hours and hours a day watching television, they're just normal Americans.

Does ABC NEWS (you know, the television channel) make note of this odd double standard? Hard to tell, since Slashdot didn't bother to actually provide us the story to read. I guess this is actually a pretty smart move on Slashdot's part. Nobody reads the stories anyway, so now to save on bandwidth they're just omitting the links.

back in the day

Back at MSU I did research on IAD. Being a computer geek and psych geek I thought it was the perfect independant study. The problem I found, which turned into my thesis, was that the entire psychological community saw IAD as a chance to "exploit" clients. So they wrote the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria to mimic that of other addictions (gambling, sex, drugs, alcohol, etc). I thought that was a horrid idea since the internet - and computer - are merely tools to an end so my thesis went something like, "Internet addiction should not be deemed a disorder in itself but another disorder through a new medium."

You've got all the traditional fixes online - gambling, power, people, and so on. You can use the internet to get to your fix, it is not a fix on its own.

Some good points

The woman's commentary is interesting. she doesn't consider her gaming an addiction because it's not destructive. While she spends less time going out, she feels that she has merely supplanted going out with going online. A transplanted social life.

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle ground between the two extremes.

As a college student, instant messaging has become a vital form of communication amongst myself and my peers. To lose access to instant messaging would severely restrict my social access. It's a less attention consuming form of contact than a phone conversation and it allows me to converse with multiple friends at the same time rather than being tied down to one at a time. Often my buddies plan to head out somewhere over the ventrilo chat channel. If I'm not at a computer I'd miss out.

We play games together as a group, it's a social activity that has introduced me to the bulk of my hometown friends. It supplants gathering 'round for a football game since only a few of us are even interested in spots.

I didn't grow up immersed in sports, undiagnosed athsma kept me from excelling in sports for a long time and instead video games took its place as a recreational activity.

There was a time when video games seemed to be the sole niche of an underground geek culture. However, as time progressed, the video game industry has blossomed and television advertisements for games have become commonplace. Many geeks would come to wonder when jocks started playing games too. They had probably been playing all along, but since video games have become more prevalent, society has become more accepting of this hobby and more are admitting to the activity.

Humanity has experienced a diverse set of lifestyles. We've tilled fields to scratch out subsistence lives in the countryside and washed ourselves with buckets of water, we've moved into cities and have become accustomed to commuting to work over distances that would have taken a full day of travel, and we are now touching upon an age where computers will become a natural extension of our lives.

How much is too much? This is clearly a question of values. Notably physical health is questioned. Also, mental health may come into question when some choose to completely divorce themselves from reality in order to live out another life they find more comforting. Society will also come to consider how much "real" social contact can be replaced with virtual contact.

(Btw, at some point, we're going to have to figure out a system to properly convey a range of emotions through text if we are going to make virtual contact more like real contact. We might need to upgrade keyboards with emotion keys akin to Caps Lock and make the necessary software changes. The earlier slashdot article on misconstrued posts raises this question already)

Addiction is Measureable

Addiction implies the brain has been altered to reinforce the desire to continue use of the addictive stimulant. Powerful addictive substances alter the functioning of the brain and can (at least in some cases) be measured either via chemical imbalance or altered brain scans.

Addictive substances are addictive because they've evolved that way -- they exert some type of control over other creatures (like humans) by stimulating the pleasure centers of the host's brain. It's really a symbiotic (or in some cases, parasitic) relationship between two species. Computers don't fit into this picture.

Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books? What about people who play sports? Or pursue any other hobby for that matter? Just because some people choose to spend a lot of time at the keyboard doesn't mean their brains have been altered to *need* the experience.

Re:Addiction is Measureable

Are people who read a lot of books addicted to books?

Funny you should ask.

When novels started becoming widely popular in Europe, there was a lot of concern about people spending too much time reading them and neglecting more important and vital aspects of life. Madame Bovary is, ironically enough, a novel that is in part about the detrimental effects of an addiction to the reading of novels; the same in a sense could be said of Don Quixote.

People always have decried whatever the "addiction" of the moment is, and they probably always will.

But it's not their fault, really. They're addicted to doing so ...

How I solved the problem

I was being distracted from my studies by the computer. My solution? I got e-texts. For example, it was hard to sit down and crack open Nandris' Handbook of Old Church Slavonic, but with the University of Texas' online course [utexas.edu], I can position a chat window over a blank portion of the screen and study and talk over IM at the same time. Or, I can keep it in one tab and go back and forth between it and the BBC News website. In fact, I'm amazed at home much I'm getting done of studying, socializing, and keeping up with the news. Computer addiction is keeping me more productive, not less. Granted, I'm in academia, a profession based on soaking up as much knowledge as possible, but there are still millions of people who must be benefitting as much as I am.

Re:Ummm....

Nevermind, the intended link is in the submitters's webpage. Here it is: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1603466&pa ge=1&ad=true [go.com]

Ahha!

You actually took the time to find the link to the submitters's webpage?

Dude, you need to find a 12 step program - along with me. (I promised on another topic that I'd quit to go to bed. But I can quit anytime I want to...It's just that...I dont' wnt to...I wan't to stay up for more hours... here on /....really...I can quit at anytime...no REALLY....don't touch that RJ-45 connector..GET AWAY!.......(Intervention)

Re:Ummm....

Oh, I just figured it was a new strategy to mitigate the slashdot effect since most of us don't read TFA anyhow.

Re:Ummm....

It's telling that 3 screenfulls of comments were posted before someone noticed the fact that there wasn't a link to TFA.

Re:mmm

Indeed. I have massive hand stregnth due to my mousing and keyboarding, and the girls always like it when we're good with our hands. And of course, if THAT fails...

Re:mmm

Indeed. I have massive hand stregnth due to my mousing and keyboarding, and the girls always like it when we're good with our hands. And of course, if THAT fails...

You're going to learn to type with your tongue?

Re:Well, what?

if the sole criteria for deeming something an "addiction" is that you spend a lot of time doing it so much as to neglect other activities, then why not say *sleep* is addicting?

Because that is a silly definition of addiction. William S. Burroughs covered this somewhere in Naked Lunch. Something is addictive if that thing creates the feeling of need for more of the thing. Certain drugs are addictive, because users cannot stand being without them, while I, who never tried them, do not miss them.

Oxygen is not addictive because my body inherently needs oxygen. The need was not created by exposure to oxygen. Same for sleep.

Computer use addictive? Perhaps for some people surfing or hacking could become a psychological need. This is different from just wasting a lot of time on computers.