That was the question a coworker asked me just last week. He and several others had been discussing the irritating habit, among several of our company’s iPhone and Blackberry-equipped personnel, of fiddling constantly with the devices during meetings and lunchtimes. During one lunch hour, a friend of mine even said to me, as I checked my Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter accounts, “OK, Phil. You can either be lost in that, or we can have a conversation during lunch. It can’t be both.”
I had started to receive comments from people through e-mail that were beginning to give me pause, too. “Wow,” one person said. “That was an insanely fast response. Don’t you ever go home?” Someone else commented that I must sleep with my Blackberry under my pillow. Then, one day, I found myself surfing the Crackberry forums, a discussion site devoted to people sorting out technical issues with their devices (among other things).
I began to wonder, and genuinely. Especially when family members expressed irritation that I was always playing with my phone, I had to ask myself: Was I addicted to technology? Specifically, was I addicted to being connected to every aspect of my online work and social life, to the exclusion of the real world – or, at the very least, to its detriment?
Earlier in Technocracy, we discussed whether technology is driving us all into early graves. I realize, now, that in describing my relationship with technology then, I was still resisting certain aspects of being completely connected. I’ve since left those reservations behind and embraced complete electronic connectivity … but at what cost?
Last year, Clara Moskowitz, writing in LiveScience, referred to Crackberry addicts like me as “over-wired people.” We are “so focused on [our] gadgets,” she explained, that we “neglect relationships with other people. … Communication aids such as texting and e-mail may actually hamper our abilities to have more important face-to-face conversations.”
Moscowitz pointed to some studies done in 2006 that seem to hint at Internet addiction, though there’s no conclusive evidence that would produce a medical diagnosis. In 2007, however, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology “recommended that Internet addiction be regarded as an extreme disorder on par with [addiction to] gambling, sex addiction and kleptomania.”
Terri Wells, in this Opinions piece, said that a Dr. Ivan Goldberg “first theorized the disease of ‘internet addiction disorder’ in 1995; the earliest references to it online date from 1997.” I have no problem believing this, either. I went to college from 1990 to 1994, just before there was a consumer Internet as such. Our university had a VAX system that connected it to similar networks at other schools, and it was possible to send e-mails to people at those schools if you knew the complicated text string to get them there. What that network also allowed us to do was play a Multi User Domain, or MUD – the forerunner to today’s MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games. It was entirely text-based, but the MUD allowed users to interact with other characters, fight monsters, earn money and even code parts of the game.
I watched several students fail out of college because they stopped going to classes in order to devote all of their time to playing that game. The worst addicts went to the computer lab and used two different machines in order to run multiple characters at once. I didn’t know, then, that I was seeing something akin to Internet addiction. I know it now, and it’s very familiar.
The problem is significant enough that support and recovery groups are now plentiful, such as the Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery. This organization offers a quiz to determine if you are, perhaps, addicted to being online (conveniently, the quiz is online) and has an online bookstore and blog. The questions in their quiz point to the warning signs, asking such things as, “How often do you find that you stay online longer than you intended? How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? How often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?”
If I have an incipient Internet addiction as facilitated by my Blackberry, breaking that cycle of digging ever-deeper into that addiction was not something I did by choice. Looking at my budget, I realized that the Blackberry was costing me an extra 35 dollars per month that I didn’t need to be spending for just a phone. Without thinking about the implications, I stripped the PDA package from my cell plan. This effectively rendered my Blackberry neutered. It’s now a phone. No longer is it constantly chiming to alert me of new MySpace or Facebook friend requests, much less to inform me of e-mails to my multiple accounts.
At first, I found it unnerving that my e-mail was completely silent. Before, every time I got an e-mail, my Blackberry would also chime. Now, the e-mail is as silent as it always was. A funny thing happened as a few days passed. I found myself no longer tensing up, wondering if I had heard the sound of an e-mail arriving – because of course it couldn’t have happened. I started to come to terms with the fact that it’s not normal to be checking your e-mail and websites every minute of the day. These are delayed-response media and should be kept that way.
The more I relaxed, the more I grew calmer concerning the place of consumer technology in my life, the more I was able to keep my use of e-mail and related websites in its proper perspective. I was addicted, and breaking that addiction – if in fact I’m doing so, and not merely becoming complacent before it starts again – has improved my day-to-day life immeasurably.
Breaking your Internet addiction could do the same for you.
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