Confessions of Webaholics

Did you just notice the time? Has it been five hours (or more!) since you’ve been watching movie clip after movie clip on You Tube? Or may be you were just randomly searching people’s profiles on Facebook or chatting on MSN with old fifth grade companions that you last met more than two decades ago, all in the name of good old “socializing” of course…

From “virtual window shopping” on E-Bay to reading tons of often low quality internet literature supposedly in search of an inspiration to blog, compulsive webaholics have been known to spend hours on end on these and other such largely trivial activities, often disguising their struggles with Internet addiction with flashy terms like “research” and “entertainment”.

Yes, Internet addiction…our own worse nightmare. For all those times you had been telling yourself how you were becoming a part of a superior technological revolution, somewhere along the line you may have become a hopeless “addict”. Or at least that’s what some experts would tell you anyway.

Despite the fact that the American Medical Association recently officially backed off from terming Internet and video game addition a mental illness, persisting in describing it merely as “over use”, many psychiatrists dismiss their verdict and continue to warn others about the dangers of Internet Addiction.

Independent Internet users in the meanwhile, continue to have different takes on the issue. While some admit that internet addiction is a valid phenomenon, others flatly deny they are addicted. The same group may admit to frequently losing track of time as they explore the lengths and breaths of the cyber world, and may even confess to being compulsive users of only one aspect of the Web but addiction? No way.

“I do check my email very, very frequently, probably twelve times a day on average” remarked M Ahmed, a student at the Texas A&M University, “but I know people who check their mail even more frequently and even they all seem normal people otherwise, so I’m definitely not addicted” she adds.

Others are ever far less open to the idea of being labeled an ‘addict’. A survey conducted by The Mental Help Net website amongst a random group of Internet users in the United States found out that some people dismissed the entire matter as “a farce”. Another avid Karachi based weboholic who preferred to remain anonymous agreed, “It’s probably over-hyped to an extent”.

“I spent a good part of may day online, I can’t even count the number of hours I spend online on average, but I still don’t think I’m addicted” she insisted. And her explanation? “Addicts are people that get cravings for the things they’re addicted to, they become restless if they don’t get that thing, they eventually require professional help and end up in rehabilitation centers, I know a lot of people that spend more time on the Internet then they probably should, but I can’t imagine how a virtual medium like the Internet can ever influence them to an extent like it does to say an alcoholic or drug addict”. “It’s just not physiologically possible” she insists.

While it may seem these people are showing a classic sign of addiction (rationalizing their actions while being in denial) they probably do have something of a point. Unlike other addictive material, something like cocaine for instance, which alters your body’s chemical balance by preventing the re-uptake of a substance called dopamine, causing you to want more and more of it with time (a phenomenon referred to by psychologists as “tolerance”) the medical adverse effects of prolonged Internet use are not a direct product of the nature of the information super highway itself.

They’re induced because of more general model by which our bodies react to the way we interact with machines, in this case computers. That is why you’re just as likely to contract Carpel Tunnel Syndrome from abusing the Internet as you are by abusing a simple computer with no Internet facilities. This raises the question of why some people allegedly become addicted to the Internet in the first place, and that is not terribly difficult to answer.

The Internet’s openness as medium, despite attempts by many governments to curb it, allows many people to view, express and entertain themselves and their online partners in ways often not as easily possible in real life. This explains why many addicts are often also addicted to their online subject of addiction in real life as well; gaming, gambling and pornography addiction are valid cases in point.

Nevertheless at a stage where disagreements still persist amongst the broader medical fraternity on whether Internet addiction is a valid clinical disorder at all, trying to determine what characterizes abuse and what does not, especially by the way of something very subjective, such as the number of hours your spend online every day, will not only be premature but may also be misleading.

As science tries to unlock the mystery behind Internet addiction (or overuse if you’re on the other side of the debate), all we can do is be cautious. Google up “Internet Addiction Tests” and you’ll come across a variety of so-called diagnostic tests that ask you to rate your feelings about your Internet use on a mathematical scale of 0-5 to generate indexes that claim to determine the level of “influence” your Internet use has on various aspects of your life (such as your professional, academic, social, etcetera).

While it may be an over-reaction to take the results of such tests too seriously, it may not harm us a great deal to occasionally monitor the manner in which we spend time online. For the World Wide Web’s utility as a multidimensional information sharing medium notwithstanding, the simplicity of its interface combined with a curious human tendency to inadvertently inflict upon ourselves dangerous lifestyles prone to being unwholesome, and we do have a medium that is dangerously easy to get hooked to.