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."

It's an artificial need.

[Spy der Mann]

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.

Addicted to Slashdot on Valentine's Day

[saskboy]

Someone should do a study into Slash-addiction.

Computers, games, Internet, chat, whatever can be addicting. You can tell because people will do something unproductive to the point of harming themselves. What's unproductivity you ask? Doing something that doesn't endear you to other human beings, and produces no tangible result that you can talk proudly about later with your grandchildren.

Grandchildren are what you have after you find a mate, have children, and raise them well enough that they too have children. I tell you this, because you're a Slashdotter like me, and quite possibly haven't considered the possibility that you can spend enough time away from the keyboard to actually find a mate. It's possible, since married Slashdotters post all the time, and even our great leader (1) Taco is married and proposed on Slashdot. Being Valentine's Day, it's the perfect time to wallow in your single-ness, and motivate yourself to do something tomorrow that will introduce yourself to new people and potentially a mate.

How about cars?

[Stoutlimb]

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...

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

[Pantero Blanco]

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

[HairyCanary]

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.

[mcc]

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.

A computer is multiple tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't "spend too much time on my PCs", but I do spend a lot of time editing/processing digital photographs. And editing videos. And writing letters & other documents. And writing/testing programs. And keeping up with world news. And searching for information in many sources. And managing finances. And drawing diagrams.

The fact that all the tools to perform those tasks, and more, happen to be in the same box is incidental.

Depends on how you define needs

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

I think..

[No. 24601]

The real question in determining whether an addiction exists is not how much time the person spends on the activity, but rather what happens to the person when they cannot for whatever reason do that activity (say by unexpected circumstance).

Re:Well, what?

[Crispy Critters]

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.

Re:Depends on how you define needs

[rewinn]

>self actualization

Well said! As Maslow put it in A Theory of Human Motivation [yorku.ca]:

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization....The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions.

Technology facilitates these needs in two ways.

Technology lowers the transaction costs. It's easier for me to write with a keyboard (and, ahem, spellcheck) than with a quill pen. Also to the degree that communicating with other people helps in the creative process (e.g. /. encourages me to think and to write about subjects like this, which might otherwise pass me by.)

Technology makes it easier to more broadly disseminate the products of creativity, both in space and time. The near-annihilation of geographical limits is obvious, but what may be of greater interest to persons seeking self-actualization is the knowledge that once something goes into the Internet Archive [archive.org] and its various commercial analogues, e.g. Google's database, the creation may last longer than humanity itself. That's not immortality, but perhaps as close as we can get with current technology!

Re:Addiction is Measureable

[Woldry]

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 ...

Or both.

[StikyPad]

To count as a real addiction in Griffiths' view, it has to be destructive, cause withdrawal symptoms and prompt ever greater use to maintain the kick.

I think that third qualification is a bit of a red herring. While it's true that many substances require the use of increasing amounts to achieve the same effects, there are limits. In the case of most substances, it's toxicity. There's also supply, and even the physical ability to consume increased quantities. If internet addiction exists, the limit would be time. The balloon can only get so big. If you're spending all of your waking time doing something, you simply can't devote any more.

Personally, I think online games have a higher risk of abuse than most other typical activities, and I think the biggest factor is that they never end, MORPGs in particular, since most people are naturally driven to finish what they start. It's sort of like gambling, in that most people don't have specified rules as to when they'll stop, therefore they simply continue to play indefinately. In a sense, MORPGs are even more conducive to continued play because the only resource the player can run out of is time.

Internet addiction also shares common ground with eating addictions, in that some use is a de facto requirement of life in the modern world. Most people control their eating acceptably well (although recent health trends arguably demonstrate otherwise), but a few take it to excess. With food, especially unhealthy food, becoming increasingly cheap, the only limit is self control. While everyone likes to think of themselves as having great self control, nature has conditioned us to do the opposite due to scarcity. Part of addictive behavior may well be attributed to that instinct.

Re:As opposed to, you know, television.

[slavemowgli]

It's all about agenda. Computer games, the Internet etc. are in direct competition with TV, so it shouldn't be surprising at all that TV channels try to portray them in a less-than-positive light whenever possible; after all, they're taking away their own client base.

It's like going to the American Meat Institute and asking what they think of vegetarianism.

They were never this concerned about TV habits

[Banner]

But of course, they're a TV network, aren't they? Wonder if they're begining to feel the heat with people turning off TV which is a one-way medium, and turning on their computers where they get to interact with other people?

Personally I'd rather have people on Computers than TV, computing is far more social, and (hopefully!) intellectually stimulating than the drivel that constitutes as network programming these days!!

Re:problem?

[Golias]

"Addiction" has been gradually re-defined over recent years to mean, "something other people think you are doing too much."

Re:Not an addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

A psychologist, in an article I read, defined addictions in this way. "If your behaviour is compulsive, you are unable to control it, and its having a detrimental effect on other important aspects of your life, then you are addicted." There is nothing "unreal" about being addicted to gambling, internet chat, or video games. All of these activites have the effect of releasing endorphins into the brain creating a rewarding sensation: a "rush". You can even experience withdrawl symptoms after the cessation of such activities. Why do you think people lose $25,000 gambling only to do it over and over again until they're broke? Get your facts straight, and not from a "competent hypnotist".

It's all in the definition, and the definer

[argStyopa]

I'm sure it will stop being considered an "addiction" by the mass media companies (ahem, I mean "objective news organizations" of course) as soon as they can figure out a way to (re)capture those eyeballs reliably for advertising revenue.

You mean someone has given up their 8-hour-a-day TV watching in favor of a 8-hour-a-day internet experience? They MUST be addicted.