A student emails friends, browses the World Wide Web, blows off homework, botches exams and then flunks out of school. This is a typical description of the downward spiral of the “net addict”. These are often associated with college students because schools give students no-cost/low-cost linkage to the Internet but it can be anyone. Some become addicted to chat groups, some to online pornography, some simply to the escape from real life. Stella Yu, 21, a college student from Carson, California, was rising at 5 a.m. to get a few hours online before school, logging on to the Internet between classes and during her part-time job, and then going home to web surf until 1 a.m.
Her grades dropped and her father was irate over her phone bills.”l always make promises I’m going to quit; that I’ll just do it for research,” she said. “But I don’t. I use it for research for 10 minutes, then I spend two hours chatting.”
College students are unusually vulnerable to Internet addiction, which is defined as “a psychological dependence on the Internet, regardless of type of activity once ‘logged on,” according to psychologist Jonathan Kandell. The American Psychological Association, which officially recognized “pathological Internet use” as a disorder in 1997, defines the Internet addict as anyone who spends an average of 38 hours a week online (The average Internet user spends 51/2 hours a week on the activity). More recently, psychologist Keith J. Anderson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that Internet dependent students, who make up at least 10% of college students, spent an average of 229 minutes a day online for nonacademic reasons, compared with 73 minutes a day for other students. As many as 6% spend an average of more than 400 minutes a day, almost 7 hours using the internet.
Internet addiction is often accompanied by another kind of dependency, namely data addiction. According to Harvard University psychiatrists Edward Hallowed and John Ratey, the constant stimulation provided by frequent incoming data and the constant multitasking that goes with it have produced a condition they call “pseudo-attention deficit disorders”. Its sufferers, says one description, “become frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone.”
What are the consequences of Internet addiction? A study of the freshman dropout rate at Alfred University in New York found that nearly half the students who quit the preceding semester had been engaging in marathon, late night sessions on the Internet. The University of California, Berkeley, found that some students linked to excessive computer use neglected their course work, a survey by Viktor Brenner of State University of New York at Buffalo found that some internet addicts had “gotten into hot water” with their school for Internet related activities. “Grades decline, mostly because attendance declines,” says psychologist Anderson about Internet-dependent students. “Sleep patterns go down. And they become socially isolated.”
Sometimes, its best to realise that you’re falling into this trap, a useful indicator can be found by doing this Internet addiction test but the most difficult part, as with any addiction, is with realising that there is a problem in the first place. Once you’ve overcome that hurdle, you’re on the way to recovery.
Or you could just hope for a powercut!