The problem with that article, and dozens like it that ran in 1996, is that ““Internet addiction’’ doesn’t really exist. This disconnect between reality and reporting was symbolic of the general media’s inability to convey the boggling changes that society is about to undergo, all because of our impending connectedness. The media declared 1995 the Year of the Internet; in ‘96, we tried to explain it to you. The measure of our success, sadly, may one day be judged by the Internet-addiction scare.
For starters, the term was coined as a joke by New York City psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg, who was astonished that people took him seriously. ““There ain’t no such thing!’’ he would howl to journalists, who wrote their stories anyway. Yes, it is true that many people use the Internet for hours on end; and, yes, it is true that a small percentage of those people go overboard, preferring the companionship of their online buddies to whining kids, demanding spouses and tedious responsibilities in the so-called ““meat world.’'
But these people aren’t addicted, certainly not in the way that alcohol, drugs or cigarettes cause a measurably physical craving. Nor can you compare the Net’s lure to gambling and overeating fixations: those are destructive activities, and the Net is not. ““Using the Internet,’’ writes psychologist Storm A. King, ““is no more inherently addicting than any other human activity that someone might find pleasure-producing, valuable, or productive.''
To anyone who even vaguely understands the direction in which the Internet is taking us, this should be obvious. The attempt to get excessive online time classified as an official disorder misses the bedrock reality: the Net is going to be a pervasive yet unobtrusive force in our lives. It will become the medium by which we keep in constant contact with our families, watch television, dash off a note to a friend, check the traffic, read the newspaper, prepare a report for work, make a phone call, buy a book. The Internet is destined to become so ubiquitous that the novelty of its usage will fade into the background. It’s going to be almost as common as breathing.
This is not to say that the Net will merely become a new way to conduct the same sorts of activities. This is an interactive medium, one that has both a spectacular ability to amplify a single voice and an uncanny talent for sifting through a Babel of information in order to send you the particular data nuggets you desire. It’s going to change things, big time. Guessing the nature of these changes isn’t easy. But there are signposts along the way.
I’ve been cruising the Internet-addiction support conferences lately, as well as talking (cold) turkey with Dr. Kimberly Young, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Bradford campus who specializes in the alleged disorder. Everybody seems to agree that what keeps certain people online for hours at a time is not stuff like Web surfing or home banking or getting the weather in Slovenia: it’s the unrestrained contact with other human beings. When people use the Internet to excess, they’re participating in conferences, sending megabytes of e-mail and hanging out in chat rooms.
Who are these people? Typically, they seem to be folks who don’t get out much and are blown away by the intimacy they find by hooking up with fellow cybertravelers. You’ll commonly read confessions of homemakers who neglect their chores because their Internet life seems so much more compelling. One grandmother spoke of a recent nadir in her Internet odyssey: she forgot to thaw out a frozen ham before she cooked it for dinner, and her family was appalled at the ice-cold center. When I read that, I pictured someone whose normal circle of friends and acquaintances was quite limited. Now she has access to virtually millions of soulmates and can speak to them with little fear of embarrassment. In a sense, she is experiencing the sort of potentially disturbing freedom that was thrust upon people in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when the agrarian, family-based mores were permanent- ly disrupted by the need to work outside the home.
These personal disruptions lend themselves to big questions, like, what will be the eventual impact of extending human powers of communication so dramatically? But instead of tackling these admittedly knotty conundrums, much of the press continues to paint the Internet age as the coming of Godzilla. Distorted reporting about a tragic liaison or two that happened to begin on the Net leads to hysterical headlines about cyber rapists. When a scare story about the Net is used as bait, it’s scandalously easy to pull off a hoax, as occurred recently when pranksters invented the phenomenon of ““online gangs’’ and got national coverage.
Don’t let any of this intimidate you. The Internet explosion will ultimately present us with a stunning array of choices: what to see and what to buy and whom to meet and how to express ourselves. But we’ll also have the choice to turn it all off. As with other things we do to excess–like watch television and work–unplugging might be more difficult than we’d like, but certainly we’ll be able to do it without entering rehab. Banning it from our lives permanently, though, won’t really occur to us. Like automobiles, the telephone, washing machines and rock music, the Internet will become an indelible fixture of modern life. Not so much because we can’t live without it but because we won’t want to live without it. And that’s not addiction. That’s progress.
