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Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder (1996) [pdf]
- motohagiography 5y ago> Dependents spent a M = 38.5, SD = 8.04 hours per week compared to Non-Dependents who spent M= 4.9, SD = 4.70 hours per week. Rookie numbers.
- Scoundreller 5y agoThe SF is the standard deviation. The dependent group was spending 5.5 hours a day. Though I probably spend over 24 glowing rectangles-hours per day, soooo… https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing-re-1819570829 https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-sta...
- Jensson 5y agoAn average white collar worker today probably spends more than that just doing their job.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoIf someone had told me back in 1996 that in 11 years I would spend 2 full months of 2007 playing WoW I would have laughed in their face.
- teekert 5y agoCame here to read exactly this comment, thanx for not letting me down.
- johnisgood 5y agoI spend around 12 (sometimes 48) hours a day on the Internet. 8.04 hours per week is nothing... ~1 hour per day. That is nothing.
- cristoperb 5y agoIt's 38.5 hours per week (with a standard deviation of 8.04 hours). Still doesn't sound like too much today.
- johnisgood 5y agoOh sorry, my bad! Still, that does not sound much either.
- code4money 5y agoNot recognized in the USA as a DSM disorder. Probably because insurance companies don’t want to pay for treatment for that many affected.
- sysOpOpPERAND 5y agooh dang, so hmmm
- sidcool 5y agoWhat's the solution to internet addiction? It's only seeming to get worse.
- zeta0134 5y agoI definitely recommend checking out your local public library, or going for a long walk in a nearby park. Don't take your phone. Allow yourself to be bored. Let your mind wander. Once you get over the weird feeling, and the anxiousness of not knowing what's been happening, you'll likely find that your mind amuses itself. I have a sneaky suspicion that relaxing in this way and encouraging that mental wandering grants some sort of benefit, though I can't put my finger on what exactly. When I come home I'm always refreshed, and the next day often eager to get started on some idea I had while out and about. If I take a news feed with me, I miss out on this experience and, over time, seem to find myself drained of energy. Same if I compulsively check that feed the moment I get back home. A proper disconnect once in a while seems to work wonders. It's like... being constantly connected all the time is over stimulating somehow, without realizing it in the moment.
- sabellito 5y agoYour advice to the comment, sadly, amounts to someone telling a drug addict to "just not use drugs", or a depressed person to "just go outside".
- boppo1 5y agoCold turkey is a legitimate addiction strategy. Not successful for everyone though, and basically impossible for most people with the internet.
- zeta0134 5y agoAh, perhaps it has been misinterpreted. That was not my intent. "Take occasional breaks, they seem to help" was the goal, not "stop entirely and never start again."
- 5y ago
- freewilly1040 5y agoOne of those old scares which seems a little quaint now, not because the fears were unfounded, but because the feared thing came to pass and is normal. Similar to old fears that family time would turn into TV time.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoAnd in the meantime suicide and depression keep climbing
- OneTimePetes 5y agoYes, but the source of that is not the symptom.
- xorfish 5y agoSuicide rates worldwide have been consistently dropping. The same is true for Europe. The US is an outlier, the suicide rate has increased by 10% between 1996 and 2017. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide https://ourworldindata.org/suicide I'm not sure that there is comparable data available for depression since our understanding of it has changed over the last 30 years and getting consistent data is very difficult.
- DanBC 5y agoOur World in Data is not a suitable source for suicide statistics, especially if you're comparing different countries across time. They don't tell you what populations they're using; they don't tell you how these different countries are counting suicide; they don't tell you whether the methods for counting have changed over time in these countries.
- xorfish 5y agoThe data source is the World Health Organization. The data quality from different countries is included in their report. The data for western Europe and the US is of high quality. Which data would be of higher quality?
- vertere 5y agoRelated episode of Build For Tomorrow (formerly Pessimists Archive) podcast: https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addicted-to-technology https://player.fm/series/build-for-tomorrow/you-are-not-addi...
- keithnz 5y agoI remember when this came out originally.... IRC addiction was quite common at that stage. Was a good age, when people enjoyed the novelty of being able to make friends all around the world.
- bigger_inside 5y agoHave we collectively forgotten that Ivan Goldberg coined this term as a joke? It was also an ironic commentary on the overreach of addiction metaphors to encompass everything that existing social structures, especially established structures of productivity and wealth extraction, found disruptive. In that sense, the advent of "internet addiction" as a frame of reference was also part of the internet moral panic, which itself was just another iteration of all technology panics that have accompanied every shift in communication technologies, including the TV, movies, radio, novels, and book printing (which was the original fake news panic). So, grain of salt.
- amelius 5y agoStrange reasoning. If I make a joke about holodeck addiction, then it can't be a real thing after the holodeck is invented? Or should every doctor refer to my joke?
- DennisAleynikov 5y agono, rather that its funny how a term coined was so far from the reality of the situation just a few years down the timeline. initially the internet was a bit of an enemy, and turns out they were right eveyone became internet addicted.
- bigger_inside 5y agoThe point is about psychiatric colonization of making sense of things that need not be framed that way, and where that framing is not only stigmatizing, but also defends "legacy" ways of doing things against existing social power structures. Ivan Goldberg was criticizing that in the 90s, by making that joke: look, all the things they take as "symptoms of addiction", if you transfer that to what we, we realize that these need not be symptoms at all - just a form of passionate action in something." And boy, did that backfire. Psychiatry has a long history of being a structurally conservative field that frames the action of people as "symptomatic" when it irritates existing hegemonic social expectations; there are great texts by Erving Goffman on how psychiatric framing defends our ideas of social normality against disruption, and tends to make it "just an individual disease problem". That completely ignores social change and, more importantly, social power structures in which suffering has much deeper contextual roots than just "this person is sick". (Goffman calls this an "illegitimized state of being "away", as opposed to legitimized ones like praying or working) [0]. Literature in game studies/critical education notes that declaring teenagers "addicted" because they use the little time school and homework leaves them - later at night - to game with friends rather than sleep stigmatizes their free use of time, their social connections outside of school, and their impudence of daring to try to decide over their time themselves rather than just submit to school-ordered ideal time management ideas.[1, but German]. Ivan Goldberg was trying to fight against the internet being stigmatized in the wake of yet another technology panic, and he did it after it was invented. And without intending to, he became the unofficial father of medicalizing it. [0] Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places. [1] Michael Dellwing, Alessandro Tietz Pathologisierte Sozialität: „Spielsucht“ als institutionelle Verteidigung. In: Dellwing und Harbusch, Pathologisierte Gesellschaft? Weinheim: Beltz.
- the-dude 5y agoAverage TV hours / day for the US : https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-television-use-per-person-in-the-us-since-2002/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/186833/average-televisio... 2014 : 4.20 hours / day 2020 : 3.33 hours / day
- boppo1 5y agoDo they have one for 'general non-work screen time'?
- jcun4128 5y agoWhen I lose internet I remember that I live alone/don't have much else to do. Will hopefully change at some point but yeah. I always have some form of noise on.
- cloudengineer94 5y agoI have been giving a lot of thoughts into this for quite a few years now. A few years ago I went on a trip and ended up staying at a friend's house where he didn't any internet connection. There was Mobile Data available but where I was it was very expensive due to the data cap being 1GB at the time. Anyhow, being disconnected for like 3 days in a row felt like a drug user without their "fix". There was no way to connect to the internet so I could watch either news or talk to my loved ones via Skype (now you can see how many years ago this was) or just play some online game. It was a weird experience because after those 3 days it felt like I was in a coma, I was completely disconnected of everything that was going around having only the local newspaper in the nearby town to what was happening, and since it was just local/national news I had no idea what was happening in my home country. At the end of those holidays I ended up taking away that it's odd having your personal life and work life (I work remote) relying always on being "connected". Not just odd but it does feel like people who are used to it feel different once we don't have it anymore.
- indigochill 5y agoThat's an interesting anecdote compared to my experience disappearing to a cottage in northern Finland for a few days. At home I spend -way- too many hours on the computer pretty much constantly. But when I went to the cottage, I forgot about all of that and I was just in the moment. Admittedly I was with someone I was interested in and we were basically always out doing something, which is a different experience than when I go visit family and there are long stretches where I'm left to my own devices (at which point I usually go back to a computer), so maybe the social engagement (and how we fill lack thereof with internet connectivity?) is the common factor?
- kypro 5y agoSometimes I wonder if the tech withdrawal people experience is more related to the inconvenience of not having tech like smart phones and computers, rather than an actual addiction. For example, when my car is at the garage I feel like I'm going through a kind of drug withdrawal. It really bothers that I can't just jump in my car and go somewhere and instead I now need to catch a bus or walk. Before having a car this would have been normal to me, but am I now addicted to my car or is it more that having a car is really convenient and now I'm experience the inconvenience of not having access to one? Similarly, when I'm home I rarely ever use my phone and it will often run out of battery without me noticing until I want to set my morning alarm before bed. But when I'm out of the house I get really stressed when my phone is low on battery or flat. Again, I don't think I'm addicted it's just annoying that I can't easily order a taxi or map my way to some place I need to go without a phone. Having a phone is an extremely useful tool when you're out of the house. I'm not denying some people have addictions, but I wonder why in general we don't see our relationship with other technologies in a similar way. Am I addicted to electric lights and central heating? When does a recognising and appreciating the connivance of a technology -- perhaps even to the point where you can't imagine living without it -- become an addiction? If it's having a negative impact your life then I get it, but recently there seems to be a push to label anyway -- even kids -- who simply enjoy using tech as "addicts".
- h2odragon 5y agoThere was a time when the impact of Novels (fiction books) on young women's health was a topic of hot debate. When this "Internet addiction" label got pasted onto the same old "be scared of the new fad" it coincided with Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign and sought tailwind from the term "addiction"; oddly just as "addiction by prescription" began its meteoric rise. Nor should we forget all the Internet Sex Predators; small town sheriffs all over the country getting their rocks of role playing then busting their playmates when they need a news story. That movement drew some of the worst elements of our society into just exactly the positions of power we didn't need them to be. Many are still there, i think.
- Mezzie 5y agoI remember when this article came out. I was 8 and definitely fit the criteria and have ever since, but for some reason it's not a 'problem' anymore since now everybody has internet access to the point where it becomes logistically difficult if you DON'T for whatever reason. Instead of "Mez is a weirdo who spends all of her time online", now it's "Oh, ask Mez [about whatever thing they heard online], she'll know what's going on." Now the "problem" is TikTok/"the algorithm". Which, don't get me wrong, algorithmic discovery and content provision have issues, but a lot of the panic is non techy people just not understanding something new. I'm sure in 10 years we'll be panicking about something else.
- bumby 5y agoAll of that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily negate the article claims of professional and social impairment. It just normalizes that behavior.
- Mezzie 5y agoThe claims are missing an important variable when trying to determine if a behavior is harmful: The social context of that behavior. In the context of the 90s (and especially for adults), spending too much time online was, in some ways, an inherently anti-social act: You had to be physically tethered to the machine, often monopolizing the only other of long-distance communication available (the landline phone line) for the entire house, and, when people and households shared computers, it often meant others COULDN'T use the tool. In 2021, none of that is true. Also, there were certain cultural ideas about what types of 'socializing'/'friends' counted as well as what constituted 'normal' behavior. It's entirely possible Internet addiction is real and this article is interesting as one of the first to mention such a thing, but the Internet and Web just hadn't been embedded into society well enough to be evaluated.
- nobody0 5y agoProbably we also have backpressure as a information receivers and the tube obviously does not care about that.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoA young friend in medical school around 1996 was one of the first to diagnose 'Internet Addiction' in a student at the UofIowa. Missing classes, forgetting to eat, losing sleep, all classic addictive symptoms? I don't know why folks are dissing this; disfunction is disfunction.
- Mezzie 5y agoI think it's because it's not possible to know if that would have happened without the internet and therefore causality hasn't been established. Like if someone is self-harming, is the problem the tool or the fact that they're self-harming? Such a person might have ended up isolating themselves to watch TV, or read, or other things. I've done all of the above with books and television. In which case the issue may be information availability offering people a new option: It's a lot easier to ignore the world and read 500 books in a row if I can download them all without leaving my house and there's no check to go 'is this a good idea?' If the issue is information availability, blocking the internet/social media will do nothing. Think streaming Netflix for hours versus flipping through TV on the 90s: You'd stop flipping if nothing interested you, but on Netflix there's ALWAYS something.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoIsn't that just describing 'Internet Addiction' with more detail?