Comments on: Why there is no such thing as internet addiction

By: Gary Wilson

Gary Wilson — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:41:01 +0000

vaughanbell – “If all the people you mention were doing the same thing online then they would have the same problem. If they are not doing the same thing, then they don’t have the same problem and you need to describe what they’re doing to say what the problem is.”

So vaughnbells definition of addiction is “Doing the same thing” as other addicts.

Please cite a source on that “rule of addiction”.

Do all gambling addicts play black jack – and only black jack?

Do all alcoholics drink vodka, at night, then beat their wives?

How about assessments used by addiction specialists such as – the four Cs:

1) Compulsion to use
2) Continued use in spite of adverse consequences
3) Inability to Control use
4) Craving – psychological or physical

———————————
Or the APA’s more extensive quiz.

Answer yes or no to the following seven questions. You only need to answer yes to one part for that question to count as a positive response.

1) Tolerance. Has your use increased over time (escalation)?
2) Withdrawal. When you stop using, have you ever experienced physical or emotional withdrawal?
3) Difficulty controlling your use. Do you sometimes use more or for a longer time than you would like?
4) Negative consequences. Have you continued to use even though there have been negative consequences to your mood, self-esteem, health, job, or family?
5) Neglecting or postponing activities. Have you ever put off or reduced social, recreational, work, or household activities because of your use?
6) Spending significant time or emotional energy. Have you spent a significant amount of time obtaining, using, concealing, planning, or recovering from your use? Have you spend a lot of time thinking about using? Have you ever concealed or minimized your use?
7)Desire to cut down. Have you sometimes thought about cutting down or controlling your use? Have you ever made unsuccessful attempts to cut down or control your use?

If you answered yes to at least 3 of these questions, then you meet the medical definition of addiction. This definition is based on the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV) and the World Health Organization (ICD-10) criteria.

By: Tatyana

Tatyana — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:18:11 +0000

If one was looking for a full-blown “Internet addiction”, one would look not for excessive engagement, but rather for a significant impairment in the affected individuals’ life and continued use despite these negative consequences

Exactly!!

That’s the one aspect that’s conviniently overlooked most of the time.

I might be wrong, but it sure seems to me, (given the history of the term “addiction”, various contexts in which it’s been used and the variety of cultural / sub-cultural perceptions of addiction and addicts), that those using this term “scientifically” in relation to Internet just tell the people what they want to hear. The name always suits the namer/s.

People want to be called addicts. It doesn’t sound too bad right now.

It sounds (let’s admit it!) cool, glamorous, dangerous even. It makes good, normal people feel different, not like everybody else, like they belong not with those other regular, boring middle-class folks, but with those dark, mysterious and tragic rock-stars etc.

Every housewife, every suburban college kid, every guy sitting in the office is now an addict too, a rebel, an outsider. The one that knows what life is all about, the one who’s sure seen it’s darkest side, the one who’s been to hell and back … and all that in the warmth, comfort and safety of their home, their room, their PC and their life.

Without paying the horrible price that addicts pay, the one that’d make them realise in an instant, how foolish all this false allure is, how untrue.

Addicts lose everything to their addiction – they lose their families, friends, roof over their heads, their “freedom”, health, and, gradually and very painfully – lives, if you can call it that.

They live to use and use to live. Continue using in spite of those very, very negative consequences. simply because there’s no choice, to them. Everything else is not an option, whatever this “everything” might be …

Is there even a comparison here?! Is there anything to really talk about?!

But people will continue with the “Internet addiction” meme. No matter what

Maybe they r addicted to those words?

Example of what I’m talking about:

This quote is from a blog post by university professor (of philosophy) Justin E. H. Smith, who, it turns out, also likes to call himself an (a Facebook) addict:

This* is a particular challenge for those of us who are not naturally inclined to moderation, and who know the difference between having a second espresso** and having an addiction.

* – staying off Facebook or controlling his Facebook cravings
** – his academic peers foolishly claim to be “addicted” to espresso, as he states earlier

It’s after reading this blog entry of his, especially those hilarious words, that I’ve realized – people like to call themselves addicts!! Including, predictably, the more intelligent ones.

By: DJK

DJK — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:00:20 +0000

1. I agree that we can’t speak of Internet addiction per sé, but that we must speak of an excessive (potentially addictive) engagement with various activities ON the Internet. This however does NOT mean that people cannot become addicted to engaging in these activities on the Internet.
2. Discussing causality with regards to “Internet addiction” is similar to the question of whether the hen or the egg came first – you might as well ask yourself whether alcoholism leads to depression and similar psychopathologies or whether it’s their cause. Such arguments don’t help us understand whether “Internet addiction” exist. The fact that there is yet little evidence to suggest that heavy Internet use causes further problems may very well be grounded in that few, if any, longitudinal studies exist SO FAR.
3. “Internet addiction” has a high probability to be comorbid with further mental problems, just like any other psychopathology.
4. If one was looking for a full-blown “Internet addiction”, one would look not for excessive engagement, but rather for a significant impairment in the affected individuals’ life and continued use despite these negative consequences.

By: Ciarán Mc Mahon

Ciarán Mc Mahon — Thu, 05 May 2011 09:41:05 +0000

Personally, what I find ‘infuriating’ is when links provided, such as those to the author’s paper at the top of this post don’t work! not to mention that no full reference is provided!

But in all seriousness, what I am concerned with is when a scientist says, before dispassionately treating of the evidence, that something does or doesn’t exist.

This article reads like a rant, rather than a sober examination of fact

By: anon

anon — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:41:19 +0000

rageaholic

Definition: a person who gets excited by expressing rage; a person prone to extreme anger with little or no provocation

From Dictionary.com

Urban Dictionary isn’t really a reliable source

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:37:15 +0000

Instead of “internet addiction”, which is simply to vague, and therefore as Vaughan says, cannot be called a real addiction. A simple generalization needs to exist, in order to find a proper label and description for what is a real addiction. “Online addiction” could be the solution. The internet is a medium, as described by Vaughan, and therefore cannot in itself cause addiction. This medium simply creates access to other things that one can get addicted to ie, porn, gaming, blogging, and email.
An alcoholic is not addicted the bar, an alcoholic is addicted the to alcohol in the bar. Vaughan, I have not read you‚Äôre article but I think I understand your point. It would be silly to accuse an alcoholic of being addicted to “Joes Pub.”

By: Chloris

Chloris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:31:12 +0000

Daniel: “Online entity”, “virtual people”. So you are saying that these are not real people, real humans, connected through a computer, who are using it to communicate and exchange information, ideas, which is the very basis on which we have established the very definition of civilization?
I imagine a person would have the same reactions if they were suddenly and irrevocably removed from the very center of a society that they had become extremely attached to and dumped on an empty, alien planet. Humans are social creatures. This is not an addiction. This is just an extreme of human nature.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:56:32 +0000

Basically they were doing the same things: reading blogs, debating on forums, chatting on messengers and keeping every one of these activity under strict control waiting for updates.
When internet was just few pages here and there, almost a small encyclopedia were you could read how to take care of your flowers or about your favorite actors or about a geographical place and so on, these problems didn’t exist. It was just a library in your pc.
It’s the blogs, newsgroups, forums, messengers, chats that created a definite parallel reality where one could easily isolate in. I have seen people, who never cared about what others think of them, getting frustrated to the point of crying for the comments made by some online entity.
As long as internet was a library of informative websites it couldn’t take the place of a real life, now it can. You can simply live online. You can consider your online alter-ego the real you and just demolish the person you used to be and its existence in the real world. But it seems that the choice to live a virtual life and ignore the real one has bad consequences as one can’t really take the place of another. The virtual life many of these “addicted” have lived, they claim, felt like an illusion, like time not passing, like things not really happening; then you wake and find out your small cousins have grown up, your parents have aged, your city has transformed and time has passed and you missed it all as in a chronic trance.
So I can say with certainty that all these “addicted” did the same identical activities online. Those activities that allowed them to create a virtual alter-ego and to let it take over subtly and slowly.
I see your point. We should be talking about “chat addiction” “blog addiction” “forum addiction” but they all occur together and they’re all activities mediated by the internet.
But the fact that all these people, when without a connection, had huge psychological and physical withdrawal symptoms, kinds of back up an addiction not to specific activities but to that artificial world they have created. What they feel when they don’t have a connection is what we would feel when locked inside totally unable to get out where the real world we know and interact with is.
Maybe we should call it “virtual life addiction” or “weblife addiction” to separate the concept of using the net (mostly websites) from the concept of building a parallel and more important life on the net, at the expense of the other pre-existing life.

By: Vaughan

Vaughan — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:00:29 +0000

Daniel,
It’s not about whether people have problems with what they do online, it’s whether it makes sense to call it an addiction.
If all the people you mention were doing the same thing online then they would have the same problem. If they are not doing the same thing, then they don’t have the same problem and you need to describe what they’re doing to say what the problem is.
‘Using the internet’ does not describe a single activity so it makes no sense to talk about ‘internet addiction’.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:07:35 +0000

I think it’s plain false that internet addiction doesn’t fulfill the standard criteria for addictions. But maybe we’re talking about something different here. I have known MANY people who are internet addicted and some of them formed a group to discuss their problems. These are few examples of how internet addiction affected their life:
1) Household chores fall behind and the living place become cluttered, dirty, messy. They just can’t find 30 minutes to clean their house or themselves. They don’t invite friends over because the house is too dirty, stinky and just plain unhabitable.
2) They don’t sleep at night but spend up to 6 hours on the net. Sometimes shutting down the computer make them anxious so they sleep with the computer on. They develop insomnia even if they didn’t have it before.
3) When they wake up in the morning they run to the pc and connect to the net. Often they’re late for schools or work and don’t have time to wash their teeth or have breakfast, there’s just the internet.
4) School and work are missed. Familiar problems are invented to spend uninterrupted 24 hours on the internet without bothering eating, washing, studying or working.
5) They stop going outside because they panick when going to place without a pc. Some of them bought portable pc and wherever they went they would just connect to the internet and ignore everything or everyone else
6) When the computer breaks they get real panick attacks with tachicardia, convulsions and sweating. They start crying after few hours without an internet connection and only desire to die. As soon as the connection is fixed all the pain and desire to diet is gone and they feel better again.
7) Many just start losing weight because they can’t bother eating. It’s easier if they live in a family where people prepare food or might notice their strange behavior but when they live alone can go even 3 days straight without eating following by piggy gorging in front of the pc.
8) A person was hospitalized and after few days in the hospital without internet started to walk again in the hospital park. This person claimed to have realized for the first time in 6 years how much he missed real life, real people, real places and how he felt like someone waking up from a coma
9) Many internet addicted even stopped paying bills because it took too much time away from their addiction.
10) If there’s nothing new on the chat rooms, blogs, forums, mail box they just wait for hours, staring at nothing, zapping through your bookmarks waiting for any update or change. Soon they’re past their bad time and a whole day is passed in a second, just doing nothing.
11) Social friendly people became isolated, anxious and borderline psychotic. Their friends or relatives are worried as they see a person mutating into someone else. Once completely balanced people become aggressive, emotionally overwhelmed, crying over internet debates, insanely preoccupied about what virtual people think of them. Friends and girl/boyfriends start to leave them alone hopelessly and they become lonely and lose contact with the real world.
12) Even when they can still do other things like working, studying, eating outside … they find themselves totally distracted by the thought of internet, internet debates and internet people to the point of stopping whatever thing they’re doing to find a connection and spend easily 5-6 hours straight on the net. Often they lose their jobs and scholarships and just shut themselves in the house.
13) Holidays became the best moment to spend 2 weeks on the internet without interruption. They pass on whatever vacation offer with family or friends even if they used to love the sea, the mountain, travelling or whatever. Even Christmas Eve or New Year Eve is spent online and they forget about their family or friends.
14) They get opinionated, judgemental, fanatical and plain psychotic in a way few would ever think possible. They become a physical and emotional threat for the people around them. They start reasoning and talking as if they were living in the net, looking for debates, categorizing and psychanalizing everything and everyone. They company of people become irrelevant or painful to them and they start hating everyone. They become vetriolic like the worst trolls and become unable to express emotions and feel sick at the thought of touching someone’s else hand or kissing someone on the cheeck.
I’m talking about normal people.
People who before their internet addiction never showed any of these behaviors, never had problems being social, having friends, taking care of their house and body, eating regularly, working or studying with care. People who had never been in need of psychological counseling and that everyone recognized as balanced and friendly individuals.