The Dangerous Side of the Internet OTTAWA (CUP) – Some people shoot heroin they’ve cooked on a tinfoil takeout plate into the webbing of their toes in a back alley, while others, fuelled by methamphetamines, take apart televisions in hotel rooms after a week without sleep.
Then there are those who spend the hours between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. updating their cat’s blog to fill everyone in on the life and times of Mittens, the greatest cat in the blogosphere.
Internet addiction is as real as any drug and it has recently escalated into an actual disorder.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV), an addiction to drugs or alcohol is present if the patient exhibits three or more of the following symptoms: tolerance to the substance; consumption of large amounts over a long period; unsuccessful efforts to cut down; the time spent obtaining the drug replaces social, occupational or recreational activities; and continuing use despite adverse consequences.
Internet addiction disorder was first thought up as a joke by New York psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg in 1995. Goldberg invented it in order to show the American Psychology Association that the DSM included disorders that should be considered questionable.
He was trying to make fun of society’s obsession with its own addictive disorders, and thought being addicted to the Internet was ridiculous.
That was before people started uploading hundreds of videos of their video-game skills.
Though the makers of ergonomic chairs and Doritos are happy with masses of people sitting at their computer, Goldberg’s joke is now being considered a serious issue by psychiatrists and the general public alike.
internet origins
The Internet was originally created by the United States government as a network between military computers. It allowed users to share information quickly and over long distances. Implemented by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969, it was originally was called ARPANET.
ARPANET had no porn, no Facebook and no hilarious pictures of cats. It remained a purely military and academic system until the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when it was opened to corporate interest.
But most importantly, in 1990, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) launched its World Wide Web project. With this launch, the Internet was made public. Within only a few years, the Internet became omnipresent; now there are even refrigerators that can access it.
And when you get a wide enough sample of users, there are bound to be some who get hooked.
the intoxicating internet
In a study published by Computers in Human Behaviour in December 2007, authors Andrew Thatcher and Gisela Wretschko found that most people have what they call “problematic Internet use.”
The usage pattern was defined as “use of the Internet that creates psychological, social, school, and/or work difficulties in a person’s life.” Some of the symptoms they included were pre-occupation with online activities, the need to spend increasing amount of time online and unsuccessful attempts to reduce the amount of time spent online.
Nicholas Carr, the author of the article published in the Atlantic Monthly, titled “Is Google making us stupid?,” believes the Internet has made life a lot easier in some aspects, but has also increased our reliance on technology, which has had detrimental effects on humanity.
“My mind now expects to take in information the way ‘the Net’ distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” Carr wrote. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”
Thatcher and Wretschko claimed that as the Internet becomes increasingly integrated into every facet of life, people will spend more of their free time surfing it. Some will use their time wisely, while others will become addicted to the very idea of the Internet.
The theory makes sense — while one person uses the Internet to do research for their economics essay, another spends all their time looking up You Tube videos. These people don’t go to class, they don’t do their rotting laundry, but they do have over a thousand friends on Facebook. These people are the ones that may have a problem — and more and more of us are becoming “these people.”
Jerald Block of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon has spent significant time researching the idea that Internet can be addictive. His research has led him to believe that the Internet is actually more than just an addiction — it’s a distortion in the person’s mind.
“The relationship is [now] with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them,” Block said. “They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: e-mailing, gaming, porn.”
the gaming addiction
One of the most popular activities on the Internet is the video game. Within several months of the Internet’s public release, it was turned into an all-out gaming network.
With the release of Playstation 2 in 2000 and X-Box Live in 2002, the Internet weaseled its way into video game consoles. From World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) to The Sims, online gaming has made it possible for users to immerse themselves in a world that is forever at their whim, allowing people to create a second life that is like the real world, only with the capability to be an elf.
Just like the old adage, most good things taken in excess have detrimental effects, and video games are no exception — addiction to gaming has allegedly even been the cause of several deaths.
In a 1990 article published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, author Aviel Goodman compared the criteria lists for various addictive disorders such as alcohol dependency, pathological gambling and compulsive overeating, and came up with several addiction characteristics.
To simplify Goodman’s criteria, essentially, if you do something more than you want to, try to cut back and fail, feel crappy when you’re not doing it and balls-out great when you are, and then feel awful when you finish doing it, you’re probably addicted to whatever “it” is.
Some people exhibit this behaviour toward video games. Some people, toward the Internet. For example, South Korean gamer Lee Seung Seop died of exhaustion in 2005 after playing Starcraft for 50 consecutive hours. Though these stories are rare considering the sheer numbers of gamers, they are still unnerving and make many people wonder what causes the difference between liking video games and needing to play them.
For one thing, users with penises are far more at risk. According to a Stanford University School of Medicine study on video games, the part of the brain responsible for rewarding feelings is more stimulated in men than in women when playing a video game involving territory control. With increased playing of video games comes increased skill, and higher rewards or levels are attained.
Alan Reiss, senior author of the study and professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford, was not surprised by the outcome.
“I think it’s fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial,” he said in an Ottawa Citizen article last May. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species — they’re the males. Most of the computer games that are really popular with males are territory and aggression-type games.”
Efforts are being made to curtail gaming addictions. Notably, according to a May 2006 Washington Post article, South Korean treatment centres and telephone hotlines have opened to combat the condition. Also, in August 2005, the Chinese government introduced an “anti-online gaming addiction system” targeting Internet cafés. The government’s efforts limited the playing time of anyone under 18.
If players gamed for over five hours, a warning on the screen appeared after every 15 minutes of subsequent playing time, saying: “You have entered unhealthy game time, please go offline immediately to rest. If you do not, your health will be damaged and the benefits you can win will be cut to zero.”
If the gamer refused to quit, all their progress over the time they had been playing would be forcibly erased. This system is still in effect.
A real gaming addict is dependent on the activity to the point where they can’t stop if they want to. A person may not want to stop, but if they still find time to shower, eat and go to school, they are likely not addicted.
the pornography addiction
While Playboy was a huge hit when it first came out in the ‘50s, it’s rapidly getting as old as Hugh Hefner — and it just isn’t cutting it anymore.
Suddenly the Internet and youporn.com emerged as heroic saviours in the world of Jenna Jameson and Nailin’ Paylin.
These days, almost all porn is found either cheap or free online.
The Thatcher and Wretschko study found that the Internet is the main portal for porn due to its “ease of access, affordability and anonymity.” However, there are increasing problems with over-usage of Internet pornography.
Psychologist Gabriel Cavaglion published a study in the July issue of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity examining the problem of Internet porn addiction.
“When compulsive sex use on the Internet reaches an average of dozens of hours per week, it clearly decreases the user’s involvement, care and availability to his family, and can be detrimental to marriage and sexual relationships,” he noted.
According to a study measuring addictive sexual disorders using the DSM-IV, pornography addictions only become worse. Those affected by it are continuously desensitized to common sexual stimuli, thus requiring hardcore material to become aroused. This is strongly related to the extreme types of porn so readily available on the Internet.
Gruffly speaking, a porn addict isn’t turned on by a naked body. The naked body needs to be covered in latex, carrying a whip, flanked by a team of dwarfs, or doing something involving feces. The point is, it needs to be extreme.
What effect does this have on a normal sex life? Well, we need to remember that porn stars are basically the professional athletes of sex, so trying to work at the same level is like trying to run as fast as that Jamaican Bolt guy who tripped and danced his way to a record-breaking 100-metre time.
caught in the world wide web
If you’re awake at 5 a.m. in the centre of a field of empty Red Bull cans and Doritos packaging, putting in eye drops to counteract the effects of staring at a flat-panel monitor for 19 straight hours, you may have a problem.
But this is far from the norm. Most of us use the Internet a lot because it is a great and powerful tool, and it legitimately makes what we want to do easier, cheaper, or more fun. While not everybody has a compulsive personality, many of us do likely spend far too much time on the Internet. Our television, music and comedy fixes all come from cyberspace, along with our gaming and porn desires.
Carr put it most eloquently when he said: “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives, or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts, as the Internet does today.”
Most of us have had the experience of looking up long-lost friends on Facebook instead of writing that 50 per cent essay due the next day. The important thing, is to recognize when a change might be needed to untangle us from that web — and to do just that.