A Case of Internet Addiction

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/miss-g-a-case-of-internet-addiction/

A Case of Internet Addiction
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

There are certain popular diversions — television, video games, the Internet
— that we pursue so deliriously we end up hating ourselves for loving them.
Others we brightly recast as the duties of citizenship: newspapers, public
radio, sports.

All the while, cottage industries crop up to freak us out about our every
last cultural pursuit. In recent years, it’s Internet use that’s been styled
as potentially sick, and “Internet addiction” a new reason for self-hatred.

If you’re inclined to worry about your habits, you may have already stumbled
onto a strange and influential self-evaluation questionnaire by Dr. Kimberly
Young, a professor of business at St. Bonaventure University. Though Dr.
Young developed the test in 1998, early in Web life, it still dominates the
Google returns for “Internet addiction” and steadily stirs up anxiety.

Dr. Young told me she believes the Internet is addictive in part because it
“allows us to create new personalities and use them to fulfill unmet
psychological needs” — which sounds worrying except that art, entertainment
and communications systems are designed explicitly to permit
self-exploration and satisfy psychological needs.

The way the test loads the cultural dice in favor of reality over fantasy
should make hearts sink. In the hierarchy of the test, any real-world task
or interaction, no matter how mundane or tedious, is more important — and,
worse, ought to be more fulfilling — than online fantasy, research or social
life. “Do you neglect household chores to use the Internet?” one question
asks, and undone laundry is later cited as a warning sign. “How often do you
block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the
Internet?” goes another question.

Can this really be science? (And might another psychologist find something
to admire in a person who quiets his mind with mere thoughts of the
Internet?) I wondered whether other habits of cultural consumption were
considered pathological enough to inspire tests. The Web carries a few tests
for television addiction, and none for movies. Over on operaddiction.com,
there are no tests, only recordings to order.

In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are “addicted.”
Opera and poetry buffs are “passionate.”

Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been
represented as craven and diseased. Opera obsession leads to delinquency in
Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film “Diva”; an intense movie habit deepens the
alienation of the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer.”

Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind,
have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, “Novel Reading, a
Cause of Female Depravity.” The 18th-century worry about female literacy is
not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls
vulnerable to “predators”: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into
the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves
of vice.” Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes
life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts (“I’m addicted to the
symphony!”) or just absurd.

So why are authors and educators hellbent on using this shopworn rhetoric
when it comes to Internet use?

Gabriela

Two weeks ago, I met a professed Internet addict, a 20-year-old college
student in New York named Gabriela. (Like many addicts, she preferred that
only her first name be used.) One of Gabriela’s professors had told me she
slept with her laptop, and was wired in the extreme. She told me she had
taken Dr. Young’s test and was worried about her Internet habits.

In e-mail, Gabriela struck a note between irony and concern as she described
her symptoms. She told me she keeps an extremely late bedtime, sometimes 4
a.m., because she’s up noodling around online.

She then described a typical surfing session: “I’ll be on Facebook and see a
status update of song lyrics, and I’ll Google them and find the band name,
that I will subsequently Wikipedia and discover that the lead singer is
interesting and briefly look at his Twitter and try his music on
Grooveshark” — a music search engine and streaming service — “while looking
at pictures of him on Tumblr” — the multimedia microblogging platform —
“that will lead me to a meme I’ve never heard of that I’ll explore until I
find hilarious photos I will subsequently share with friends of mine on
Facebook.” Gabriela, who sometimes dresses in the futuristic Victoriana
known as steampunk, also loves Webcomics, a site for graphic novels and
comic books, and Neopets, a game that lets players care for virtual pets.

She indeed sleeps with her laptop in her bed, “partly so I can have my
iTunes play my Sleep playlist.” Even on the Sabbath, when she refrains from
Internet use for religious reasons, she talks and thinks about the Internet.
She told me she considers surfing the Web not so much a regimen but “a state
of being” that, like a meditative state, took her years to achieve.

Aha. I’m no addiction expert, but Gabriela strikes me as a bright,
self-effacing, religious young woman who keeps student hours and prefers
logic games, jokes, graphic novels, trivia quizzes, music, Victoriana and
socializing on Facebook to prefab pop bands.

This kind of Internet use isn’t usefully described as an addiction, even if
there’s some shirking of chores and insomnia to it. Fantasy life and real
life should, ideally, be brought into balance — but no student who’s making
decent grades needs to get off the Internet just because it would look more
respectable or comprehensible to be playing chess, throwing a Frisbee or
reading a George Orwell paperback. The Internet as Gabriela uses it simply
is intellectual life, and play. She’s just the person I’d want for a
student, in fact — or a friend, or a daughter.

It’s no accident that “search” is the dominant metaphor of the Internet. And
it’s no accident that the Internet attracts a certain kind of young, dreamy
mind at some liberty to find itself — the type that in earlier eras might
have been drawn to novels or movies. As Binx Bolling puts it in “The Movie
goer”: “What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple;
at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is often overlooked. The
search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the
everydayness of his own life.”

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