I completely agree with this especially when I`m one of the people who were in this kind of risks like loosing something very important only because of games like World of Worcraft. Lucky for me I knew when I gotta step out and I`m glad I had the strength to do it.

Sitting at a computer for too long causes major spinal problems.
Dr.David Black
www.blackchiropractic.com.au

Internet addiction is not the problem here, many people use the internet for four hours a day and they live healthy lives. What should be addressed is if a person becomes non-productive in real life or becomes depressed. You wouldn't say to a bookworm who loves books that he or she has a clinical disorder because they read 4-5 hours a day, right?

I completely agree with this especially when I`m one of the people who were in this kind of risks like loosing something very important only because of games like World of Worcraft. Lucky for me I knew when I gotta step out and I`m glad I had the strength to do it.

With the amount of crazy WoW addicts out there I will not be surprised if there's going to be a WoW disorder. There have been deaths relating to WoW.. people not eating and playing hours-days-weeks straight and just dropping dead!

I know a parent who had a little video game addict at their house, and this kid went into a royal conniption fit melt-down tantrum when the parents said it was time to go to bed and had to turn off the game. They were so happy when they found parental control software restricts internet access. Ez Internet Timer http://www.internettimer.net allows disabling the internet connection after a specified amount of time.

This is a subject that I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, so pardon me as I ramble for a moment:

As someone who has played World of Warcraft on and off for the last 3.5 years (including significant time off for various reasons), and other online games since essentially forever, my take on the topic at hand is that I've played such games through great and not-so-great phases of my life, and that I'm not entirely certain that a cause-effect relationship even exists, as there would with something to which people become "addicted," in the drugs/alcohol sense. However, I suspect that the amount of time I play may be an effect, rather than a cause, of the quality of my life at a given moment, with more during unfulfilling phases and less during better ones, putting me in tacit agreement with you, Steve.

If internet usage, whether youtubing, blogging, or WoW-ing, does have a negative effect, I'd be more inclined to say that it can exacerbate an already bad situation. "If life seems rough, why rise to the challenge when you can just retreat to this other world where everyone has the same interests I do, and where everyone understands me," or perhaps ""Why face the dull daily grind when there's this other reality filled with witty satire, stimulating debate and bright colors," is how I imagine the thought process working when an individual over-focuses on their online life to the detriment of their phsyical one. You probably remember that character from the Matrix, Cypher, who wanted to be "plugged back in" to the green-saturated clean world full of steak and wine where he could be a movie star, rather than face another moment in the grey filthy underground eating gruel and serving a man he felt was mad. Of course he was the odd man out. He was the one who saw "the matrix" not as a tool for work or for education, like his shipmates, but as a way out, an escape. I suspect that he turned his back on his fellow men and women more out of a deep dissatisfaction with the life he led, rather than any particular love for the machines.


My (untrained) understanding of addiction is that it comes in two varieties: psychological and physical dependencies. For the latter, a foreign substance actually alters the way that your body's biochemical whatsits function to the point that they cannot fulfill their normal tasks without the presence of that substance. As far as I know, that makes it absurd to give the label of physical addiction to internet use. For the other title, psychological dependency, I would return to the case of Cypher: an individual convinces themselves that life is either not possible or not worth living without the "addictive" thing in question. In that sense, anything can become an object of addiction, without possessing any inherent qualities that cause it itself to produce addiction. In that case, the problem is, for better or for worse, within the individual. That computer use, game-related or otherwise, would become such an object, is unsurprising to me at all. This brings me back to your original point that having the amount of time spent online be the diagnostic-trigger for "internet addiction," is preposterous. However, I would expand on your conclusion in saying that there is nothing in internet usage that intrinsically makes it more addictive than sudoku, scientific research, or model ship-building, though like everything else it can become the object of serious, and seriously unhealthy, addiction if an individual is at the wrong place in their life at the moment they discover that object.

Anyway, rather than continuing to agree using superfluous wordage, I'll just part with linking a few further-reading articles about "addiction" to World of Warcraft, and one article about a "hardcore" player who has also managed to do great things with his life, though they're all from a source that just might be a bit biased:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/25/compulsive...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/20/obamas-fcc...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/06/10/wow-player...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/08/14/advice-col...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/11/fcc-comiss...

Besides being one of the most indepth post-comments to cross my blog in quite sometime, this is also a great addendum to the point I was trying to make. It's not the "thing" it's the compulsion that is the problem. If you are at a point in your life where you need an escape, you are going to gravitate to whatever compulsion is easiest (and makes to the most sense) for you.

Whether that's games, model airplanes or heroin.

By the way, since when do you read the blog Christian!? I owe you an email in the very near future, things have finally started clearing up enough for me to return to the light of day.

Cheers,

I probably spend at least 4 hours a day online, outside of work. I can quit when I have something else to do though. I'm not obsessed with any one activity. I don't play games, and I don't gamble. I use social media quite a lot, and I spend time looking stuff up and reading.

I think that it could be an issue. It's going to be an increasing one with the connectivity speed getting faster each second. In Korea, which are one of the countries with the fastest internet speed, the government had to get involved because people were dying due to malnutrition cause they were hooked on the internet, mainly for gaming.

There are pros and cons about being addicted to the Internet. We are connected online, but we are disconnected in reality. Japanese movies and anime really delve into this issue about connectivity. I never thought there was until I watched "The Suicide Club." Another good one is "Lain: Serial Experiments."

I agree, there can be serious issues associated with the abuse of the web.
The only question I'd ask is whether people who become net addicts wouldn't
have found other vectors for their compulsions? I think we should be looking
at the underlying symptoms rather than pointing fingers at particular
manifestations.

The thing is that with any addiction there was a reason why that person became addicted. Some of the reasons might be loneliness, something lacking in his/her life, feeling of importance, acceptance, etc. If you think about it, those are similar reasons for other addictions.

Excellent points and I think we should try to tackle those problems from the
ground up instead of picking on some an arbitrary problem like "internet
addiction" from the top down.