What is Internet addiction? - ARTICLE/RESEARCH FRM Center for Internet Addiction Recovery .
the answer YES in RED is ME.


How we could diagnose Internet addiction and differentiate that from general misuse of the computer. This is a very relevant question to ask in our technology-rich society. The symptoms are based upon DSM criteria as follows:

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet (think about previous online activity or anticipate next online session)? YES
2. Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction? YES
3. Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use? - YES
4. Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use? YES
5. Do you stay online longer than originally intended? YES
6. Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet? NOO....I THINK
7. Have you lied to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet? YES
8. Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)? YES

Answers should evaluate non-essential computer/Internet usage (i.e., non-business or academically related use). Clients are considered addicted when answering “yes” to five (or more) of the questions over a six-month period, when not better accounted for by a manic episode. Associated features among addicted individuals include: (1) ordinarily excessive Internet use, (2) a neglect of routine duties, (3) social isolation from family members and friends, (4) being secretive about online activities or a sudden demand for privacy when online, and (5) significant changes in normal sleep patterns (depravation). While many people may spend too much time online that in itself is not the only criteria to diagnose addiction. Therapists must also evaluate how the Internet is impacting a client’s life and look beyond diagnosis as purely a function of time.

You Know You're an Addict When...
you have more blog friends than 'real life' friends.
you're blogging in your head before you fall asleep.
your out of town husband or boyfriend or galfriend and you converse in your blog's comments.
you tell your friends and family things like, "I'll ping you and you ping me back," or "Okay, I want to trackback on your last comment..."
you blog in your head an event that's happening at that very moment!
NOW HERE IS MY SELF EVALUATION :-

I’ve noticed I spend way, way, way too much time on the internet. Of course, my job is web-centric so I have somewhat of an excuse. But I’ve noticed some troubling signs that indicate I’m probably terminally addicted. See if any of my sorry symptoms apply to you, too:

1. When I lose internet access, I start worrying about trivial information passing me by. What’s my JOBSTREET account doing? Who’s visiting my website? Did anybody sign my guestbook? What’s on the front page of DIGG? Who cares? I do. Too much.

2. As soon as I wake up, I hit the computer then the cup of coffee. And both before the bathroom.I'll make sure I get up at 5am and sleep at 2am.Start n end with my laptop/pc.

3. When people I haven’t seen in a while ask what I’ve been up to, I hear myself reiterating past blog posts. And verbally, it’s usually not as interesting.

4. I update all my MP4 player daily, in hopes to get my podcast cue shorter, so I can delete the files cluttering up my iTunes library. But I keep hitting “refresh” like a crazy gal.

5. Before stepping away from the computer to do a non-web related task (like taking a shower), I like to start a time-consuming task like downloading limewire, ripping a DVD, or backing up my hard drive. There just can’t be any downtime. An idle computer is so inefficient.

6. I sometimes prefer to watch DVDs and TV shows on the computer so I can bounce back and forth between computer related activities.

7. I get annoyed reading a newspaper because I can’t click on the headlines and jump to the proper story.

8. As soon as there’s a new software update to IE or Firefox I download it right away, consequences be damned.

9. One computer is not enough. At the very least, a desktop and a laptop. I’m also contemplating getting a third so I can use my PC as a MAME cabinet.

10. One monitor is not enough. At work I have a dual-screen set up, plus I’m checking stuff out on my Google Account at the same time. So that’s three monitors, and I could probably think of a use for a fourth.

11. I download pages from websites to my laptop so I can read them while off-line.

12. Whenever I have a question, my initial instict is to check Google or Technorati. And I actually find myself not caring to commit important things to memory because I trust I can always use Google. As a result, without Google I feel like part of my brain is missing.

13. I haven’t bought a CD or a DVD in ages since I can download music and TV shows instead. For example, I found out about Stephen Colbert’s green screen via YouTube instead of cable television.

14. I have actually witnessed a story bouncing between digg, reddit, and Slashdot, and finally showing up on CNN a few days later.

15. Sometimes I decide whether or not to do things in the “real world” on the basis of if it will make a good blog post.

16. My online “to do” list is longer than my “real world” one.

17. I get annoyed when asked to do something in the real world (like pay a bill, or change an address for a magazine subscription) and find there is no online equivalent. Do these companies actually expect me to pick up a pen and paper?

18. I check out so many RSS feeds that the convenient nature of the RSS feed no longer exists. I need an RSS feed of my RSS feeds, and I may need an RSS feed for that.

19. When people ask me what I want for birthday, I direct them to my Netflix queue or Amazon wish list. I can’t even remember what I want any more - it’s on the internet.

20. I’m writing this post about internet addiction on my blog, and will be watching my hit counter to see if anybody reads it.

i have to stop 4 a while..my shoulder n my elbow's hurt..damn!!!

i'm back..

Upon waking up this morning I stumble towards my desk like a zombie caught in the stench of brains. In transit I stub my toe on a chair, because I’m not really awake yet, and drop down into my chair. It’s difficult to focus on the computer screen at first cause my eyes are still sleepy slits and everything looks like a Picasso painting but after a few minutes I gain operational eyesight and discover I’m on Alex Barnett’s blog reading about Internet Addiction. And they tell me there are no coincidences.

Alex links to a SmartMobs post which in turn links me to a Scotsman article about the “real and damaging” effect of internet addiction. The Scotsman lede proclaims “Internet addiction is a real phenomenon which could be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, doctors in the United States have said.” Great, I think as I fiddle with my coffee IV, probably should remind myself to always start the day on Belief.net or something more inspirational — though that doesn’t brighten my morning either as I go to test my theory and I’m immedaitely assaulted by this picture on Belief.net’s homepage:



Which jams a guilty dagger deep into my hardened heart. I get that you can’t have pictures of smiling kids, playing tag and eating Bomb Pops cause who wants to help the happy, but can’t you appeal to something other than my guilt. Look at her face will you. I can hear the kid judging me for christ sakes. But anyway, I navigate back to Internet Addiction cause I’m curious, is Internet Addiction Disorder, (IAD), apparently the phrase of choice though I prefer the more stigmatizing Pathological Internet Use, a real phenomenon or just another Mickey Mouse issue bored Docs can exploit for those fifteen minutes we all crave? Stay with me and I’ll give you all the troubling truth.

Before diving into the question, I was amazed to discover all sorts of crap about IAU on the web. Not like, “wow look at all this info.” That amazement is so 90’s. Hell, you could Google “Naked Foosball” and probably find a swarming community, maybe even a few organizations:

Allow me a digression. So I went ahead and Googled “Naked Foosball.” No organizations, which is a bummer cause I was hoping for a local club, preferably at the Hooters over on Route 280. Of course I didn’t leave the first page of results so it might exist. While there were no organizations there was a CBS article about “The Importance of Marital Sex” on the first page. Who would have figured? The article was shilling some dudes book about how married couples should fuck a lot and this passage from the article got caught in Google’s hooks:

“Leman’s book has tips and ideas for putting the spark back into a flagging love life. His suggestions range from cutting back busy schedules and spending more time at home, to bubble baths and naked foosball.”
Hmmm, bubble baths and… naked foosball you say? C’mon man, that’s too obscure an activity to be anything other than Leman’s own personal perverse pleasure. I’m not knocking naked foosball. A good question to orient yourself with when confronted by any activity is “Would the world be a better place if everyone did it” and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the world would indeed be better place if everyone struck up a match of naked foosball every day. So I got no problems with the activity. I simply find it funny it’s included in the passage. Bubble baths, sure, a common sensual activity, massages would be a natural follow up, but naked foosball. Again, nothing wrong with it, just fodder for a spin around the comedic brain. Now back to IAD.

I was curious about IAD so I surfed the term and found self-tests for IAD like this one or this one, diagonstic tools, organizations with important titles like The Center for Online Addiction and articles galore. My favorite being this one from TechWeb entitled, It’s Offical: Net Abusers are Pathological. Great headline folks. Grabs you right away, though if there is indeed a disorder called IAD and you were suffering from it then reading that headline would more likely drive you off the edge of high rise then to a doctor’s office. I can almost sniff the perverse pleasure in the headline like teenagers smelling blood in the water. It’s Offical: Sally Jenkins is a Ragging Slut reads the school paper. Anyway, tons of stuff on IAD but does it amount to anything. I mean is IAD just another bullshit diagnosis we can all worry about while we wait for the pharmaceuticals to concoct another mega expensive side-effect-may-be-sudden-and-unexpected-death drug instead of shipping cheap ones to Africa?

In some ways it’s a moot point cause if you define addiction broadly as any habit that one engages in habitually and obsessively despite negative consequences then sure, internet addiction is very real. But then so is snorting snow, jerking off, eating boogers, and breathing (if you’re a raging, anger management drop out, asshole). Hell by this broad definition you could be a cell phone addict, a TIVO addict or an Ipod addict. The variations are unlimited and thus useless. If we put our foot down on this point then all Doctors promoting IAD are simply fishing for their Dr. Phil moment in the sun. They’re self-serving hucksters.

Now let’s look at the word Internet, an integral part of any Internet addiction. What the hell is the Internet? I’m to lazy to spear a definition elsewhere so I’ll throw my own out and call the Internet an environment. This works cause it’s simple, broad and it’ll let me make my next point which is you can’t be addicted to an environment. You can be addicted to things in an environment. For example, you wouldn’t say I’m addicted to the playground, well you could but you’d be wrong. The more apt statement would be,

I can’t get off that fucking see saw man. It goes up. It goes down. The thrill of it all. I think I’m addicted to that fucking see saw dude.

That statement would be correct in so far as addictions go. In other words, the see saw addict would soon be foregoing trips to the playground and building one in his living room out of discarded boxes and pieces of his furniture. So can you be addicted to the Internet? Not really, no more than you could be addicted to Central Park. However, how about specific architectures of the Internet? Like the see saw in the playground, could one be addicted to, say, email, Instant Messaging, Forums, or Web 2.0 applications?

On this point I’d have to say yes. One could be addicted to chat or email but it’s tricky cause what you’d really be addicted to would be a feeling these things give you, like the thrill of the see saw above. It’s not so much the see saw as it is the thrill you derive from the activity. In this way, Internet activities are pumping you with feelings that one thinks they can’t manufacture otherwise. Adictive activities, before biochemical changes occur, typically result from people feeling powerless in some aspect of their lives, feeling a lack of creative control. Unfortunetly, it’s impossible to escape sex here. It’s the gorilla dropping a crap in your living room.

Sex, sex, sex, as I’ve mentioned before most of our hang ups are sexual hang ups. Hell parents can’t even bring themselves to tell their kids they got a penis or vagina. “Oh that’s a pee pee dear.” Pee Pee? What the fuck is a pee pee. Coupled with the fact that parents kiss and cuddle around their kids about as often as the Arizona Cardinals win a playoff game then you got yourself repeating generations of kids mind fucked on sex. Ends up being a technical document, insert rod into hole, two pumps, quiver and act awkward. But the sex thing kinda misses the point in some respects. All these Internet activities, email, chat, forums, things which people can become addicted to, they are all social applications. They connect people in relationships. And here’s where I think Web 2.0 can play a part.

Please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m no Web 2.0 cheerleader. It’s not the tonic for all our social ills but I do think addictions are often about people attaching to activities that supply them with feelings they think they cannot manufacture on their own. One way around this is to give the person a substitute. It’s why at most drug rehabilitation facilities people walk around jacked on coffee and chain smoking, why methadone is used to treat heroine. Subtraction and addition. But before you can subtract and add you need to foster awareness. Awarness comes first.

Which isn’t an easy thing to do in our culture. I can’t choose a fuckin’ toothpaste product without some asshole trying to make me feel guilt about it. Everyone and everything wants to be The Shit. It’s all preposterous. What’s needed is awareness. Whatever toothpaste or email client I read doesn’t make me wrong. There isn’t a bigger and better out there for me. All there is is what works for me. If I like “The Worst” email client it doesn’t make me “The Worst Asshole on the Planet.” Web 2.0 applications would be served to keep this in mind. Competition is fine, but it’s not compete to destroy. All competition at the expense of others does is foster an environment ripe with confusion. It’s a loamy bed for growing people feeling lack and loss of control which lead to addictions. Positive social relations foster the opposite and if Web 2.0 is anything it’s about social networks, or it should be.

The Internet is a hub of interconnect and enmeshed social networks. Web 2.0 or whatever the fuck it is needs to expand these relationships. Building an application that traps someone in another tunnel, gives them pretty colors and a horse blinder, doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s just another pathetic toothpaste commercial. I don’t have all the answers. Shit I don’t even have some but a good start would be this: If you’re building a Web 2.0 application eliminate the work best or right from your site. In fact that’s my new rule for Web 2.0. If you have “right” or “best” on your site and don’t link to other similar applications then your Web 1.0 or whatever the fuck that is. So that’s two rules. Third would be don’t suck.

Postscript: This appears to be a somewhat timely topic. Suppose you could argue addiction is a timeless topic anyway, but I noticed that Ars Technica ran a story on Internet Addiction . Ars cites a new study that identifies five different web-based addictive behaviors. They are:

Cybersexual addiction
Cyberrelationship addiction
Net compulsion
Information overload
Interactive gaming compulsion
The article also points you to another self-test that’s ironically fodder for the Net complusive addict. I didn’t take it cause I’m an Information overload addict. I know it exists and that’s enough for me. Now onto the next headline.

It’s not a new issue; concerns over “Internet addiction” have been in the news intermittently since the early 90s, when commercial ISPs started offering access to the public at affordable prices. The spector of a generation hooked on getting their computer “fix” has been the subject of a few sci-fi books and movies.

“Addiction” is a popular buzzword these days: in addition to drug and alcohol addicts, we now have gambling addicts and sex addicts. Those who overeat are food addicts; those who spend too much money are shopping addicts, those who lose their tempers are anger addicts. Back in the olden days, before newspeak took over the language, addiction was a very real medical condition. People who are addicted to opiates or alcohol or nicotine or even caffeine go through measurable, painful, sometimes life-threatening physical withdrawal symptoms.

Obsessive or compulsive behavior does not equal addiction. Simply engaging in an activity “too much” does not make one an addict. Yet we have doctors like the one quoted in the Reuters article - people who are supposed to be trained in the difference between physiological and psychological manifestations - saying that the Internet may promote “addictive behaviors.”

Why the rush to label all undesirable behavior as a disease? My theory is that doing so benefits both doctor and “patient.” If the person engaging in the behavior can pass it off as a disease or addiction, that relieves him/her of the responsibility for changing that behavior. The addict can’t just quit cold turkey; that’s too hard. He/she needs help. Enter the doctors who cater to these pseudo addicts. If it’s a disease, their services are required - at a hefty price, of course. We all expect “healthcare” services to cost a bundle. And of course, if we can get it official recognized as a disease, maybe the insurance companies will pay for it.

I guess you can tell I’m not too impressed with the whole “Internet addiction” crisis. Sure, some people spend way too much time online. Some folks might say I’m one of them. I make my living writing, mostly for online publications, so I’m at the computer between six and ten hours a day. I have dozens of friends with whom I’ve been communicating online on a daily or weekly basis for over a decade, some of whom I still haven’t ever met in person. Even for keeping in touch with my “real world” friends and family, most of the time I prefer to zap off an email rather than picking up the phone (and thus risking bothering someone in the middle of something).

But am I “addicted?” I don’t think so. If I have to be in a place where there’s no Internet access, I miss the convenience of being “connected” but I don’t break out in sweats or get excruciating headaches or start to shake uncontrollably. Far from interfering with my “real life,” the Internet has enabled me to participate more fully in it - I find out about community events and neighborhood meetings that I probably wouldn’t attend otherwise, I obtain consulting gigs and speaking engagements. My cousins and I had drifted out of touch for years until everyone got Internet access; now we keep each other apprised of what’s going on in our lives and coordinate, via email, monthly lunch get-togethers.

Sure, the Internet can be used for nefarious purposes, too. There are predators who hang out in chatrooms to look for victims. There are also predators who hang out in parks for that purpose. The CNN article implies that the Internet causes divorces. Doesn’t it seem more likely that the people who engage in “online sexually compulsive behaviors” probably aren’t/weren’t models of marital fidelity offline, either? Ah, but it’s so much more convenient to be able to protest that “the Internet made me do it.”

The article paints a dire picture: sleep deprived addicts suffering from dry eyes and carpal tunnel syndrome who get “cybershakes,” characterized by typing motions of the fingers when not at the computer. It’s enough to make you want to go out and pass a Constitutional amendment enacting a new Prohibition, this one on Internet Service Providers. I can just imagine the black market that would spring up, with shifty-eyed techies standing on street corners, offering surreptitious connections to underground wireless networks for cash.

What the addiction proponents seem to ignore is the difference between addiction and habituation. Hanging out on the ‘Net can become a habit that’s hard to break. So can watching TV, playing the guitar, or talking on the phone. Are those addictions, too? Will we soon be seeing meetings of Unlimited Minutes Anonymous? Hmmm … one might even those who feel compelled to label any and everything an addiction are Addiction addicts.

Tell me what you think. Am I way off base here? Am I just an Internet addict who’s deep in denial?

Or is the issue being hyped by both misguided helper types and those who stand to profit from turning excessive ‘Net surfing into a dire disease?

Do you know anyone who suffers from “cybershakes”? Do you get withdrawal symptoms if you’re deprived of your monitor and keyboard? Is the Internet damaging your real world relationships, destroying your marriage, turning you into a compulsive cybersex fiend?