Internet Addiction: Is It Real?

Posted by miuki as Perspectives

Based on Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995, he states that Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is a theorized disorder originally made as a satirical hoax. He took pathological gambling as diagnosed by the DSM-IV as his model for the spoofed description.

Honestly, I’m not quite getting it.

Anyway…

Addiction itself is real, it’s not even something new. Internet on the other hand, is not new of course, but it’s rapidly changing. Life has it’s ways to confuse and mislead, or perhaps you can say it’s society/environment that caused it. Like what I’ve just written, it’s pure confusion.

See the addiction itself is a psychological “thing“. Like the need to go online otherwise you feel uneasy. In fact, you don’t actually need to go online cause whether you do or not, you can still live through the day in one piece.

I read an article that stated that:

If you believe what you read, “Internet addiction” is about to make us a nation of derelicts. Men drooling over online pornography, women abandoning their husbands for chat-room lovers and people losing their life savings on gambling Web sites are just a few of the stories peddled in today’s press.

But despite the topic’s prominence, published studies on Internet addiction are scarce. Most are surveys, marred by self-selecting samples and no control groups. The rest are theoretical papers that speculate on the philosophical aspects of Internet addiction but provide no data.

Meanwhile, many psychologists even doubt that addiction is the right term to describe what happens to people when they spend too much time online.

“It seems misleading to characterize behaviors as ‘addictions’ on the basis that people say they do too much of them,” says Sara Kiesler, PhD, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of one of the only controlled studies on Internet usage, published in the September 1998 American Psychologist. “No research has yet established that there is a disorder of Internet addiction that is separable from problems such as loneliness or problem gambling, or that a passion for using the Internet is long-lasting.”

See, if one day I don’t go online I feel uneasy. On the other hand, if I really do not go online to play games or such, I still am able to survive through the day in one piece. So what does that prove? Am I addicted or is it just that I’m somewhat used to being digitally involved?

In conclusion, I believe that it’s all in the mind. If you think you are, you are. If you think you’re not you’re not.

In other words, I do not have a concrete stand in my answer.