Are you addicted to the internet?

Josephine wakes in the night and checks her email before going back to bed. Melissa has a $500 telephone bill for exceeding her monthly usage time on the internet. Shana has been, quite literally, ‘unplugged’ from the internet in the middle of her university course for abusing her time allocations. Are these women addicted to the internet?

Anecdotal evidence indicates that some people are heavy users of the internet and may be addicted to one or more of its functions, such as information searching (‘surfing the web’), chat groups and electronic mailing. But is it a pathological addiction? John Suler of Rider University believes that “almost anything could be the target of a pathological addiction – drugs, eating, exercising, gambling, sex, spending, working, etc”. He says “in truly pathological addictions … the bad outweighs the good, resulting in serious disturbances in one’s ability to function in the ‘real’ world”.

Psychologists are presently grappling with this phenomenon. The most recent (4th) edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not yet include ‘internet addiction’. The manual, which sets the standards for classifying types of mental illnesses, has two basic criteria for inclusion. One criterion is that there must be a consistent, reliably diagnosed set of symptoms that constitutes a disorder of the mind. Another criterion is that there must be similar elements (such as personality) attributed to people who are diagnosed with the same disorder.

There is minimal research on the behaviour patterns of heavy internet users and much less statistical evidence of the number of individual internet users and the number of diagnosed addicts. Current research is based upon questionnaires (delivered predominantly by psychologists on-line over the internet) to determine the symptoms of addiction and the characteristics of internet users that might predispose people to addiction. At present, addicts are self-diagnosed respondents of the on-line questionnaires.

What attracts, fascinates and possibly fixates people to the internet; to cyberspace, virtual reality and on-line communications? The internet began as a government experiment in 1969, by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defence, with four computers connected together over telephone lines. By 1972, universities also had access to the electronic network service called the internet. The internet, or Net, can be used in two main ways. Firstly, it can be used to search for information on the World Wide Web, allowing the user to browse topics of interest and to purchase goods and services. The web pages contain information on anything and everything from jobs, cars, cosmetics, breast cancer and the weather to travel destinations, restaurant menus, football tipping and the daily newspapers. Secondly, it can be used as a form of computer-assisted communication to exchange interpersonal and social contacts with others. Cyberspace communication includes chat rooms, bulletin boards, discussion groups, email and social networking sites.

While spending an inordinate amount of time checking the stock market on the internet or searching information may become addictive, it is the heavy use of the internet as a communication medium that has psychologists intrigued. “Cyberspace communications offer people an opportunity to experience a form of social contact, with no real presence”, maintains Storm King of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. The internet allows people anonymity where they can talk to strangers and express themselves in an unrestrained manner.

The internet is an easy way of meeting people with similar interests, where distance is no barrier to social contact. It allows membership to a discussion group where race, creed, age, disability, gender and professional status are minimised. With anonymity, users have control over their persona that they choose to display to the group. People may assume a pseudonym, such as Kitten, Sexpot, or Mean Machine. In this way, gender roles can become confused, deliberately or otherwise. Graphical interfaces also enable people to create or adopt an avatar (a small cartoon-like character) to facilitate communication. A person may communicate their opinions without fear of reprisal. Therefore, anonymity and total freedom of expression is a major attraction to this form of on-line social interaction.

Storm King explains other desirable attributes of the internet. These include its ease of access, 24 hour availability, the wide range of diverse personal connections, the voyeuristic ability to witness the communication of others without participating, and the uninhibited nature of the communications. He believes that these attributes may provide the potential for rewarding, stimulating and emotional involvement. King says “the passion possible is understandable, as virtual community involvements dissolve geographic boundaries and expand the ability of people with common interests to share ideas important to them. However, the nature of addiction is to continue to pursue the initial excitement one received, at the risk of other social involvements and responsibilities”.

Storm King maintains that there have been reports of internet-related deaths, such as cardiac arrests resulting from sleep and food deprivation. He also cites the occurrence of suicides due to internet stress. A study by Raushenberger in 1995 concluded that depression and symptoms of human dissociation were highly correlated with people most prone to fantasize. As social status has no relevance or meaning on the internet, a person may adopt a fantasy life to elevate their perceived social status or to gain recognition for their opinions and ideas. “There is a very real sense of having achieved status when others … quote one’s messages or acknowledge one’s contribution”, says King. This desire for elevated status could, he believes, predispose a person to compulsive internet use. Fantasy proneness, shyness, social phobia, and perceived lack of social status are all characteristics that might constitute a vulnerability to internet addiction, maintains Storm King.

Psychologist, Michael Fenichel believes that people who spend a disproportionate amount of time on the internet tend to have similar characteristics. These include high-speed mental processing abilities, a loss of mid-term and long-term goal directedness, diminished attention span, disrupted patterns of living and sleeping, and detached or disturbed social relationships, often using the internet as the focal point for all contact with the world.

Pathological addiction is, therefore, much more than attraction. The consensus of interested pyschologists is that there is no one cause for addiction and that using the internet is no more inherently addictive than any other human activity. The addiction is dependent on the exposure rate to the phenomenon and the amount of time spent connected to the Net. When the line between passion and pathological addiction is crossed, the people closest to the addict are generally the first to notice. Addicts usually deny that their heavy internet use may have a detrimental effect on their physical, psychological, interpersonal, marital, economic or social functioning.

Dr Kimberly Young of the Centre for On-line Addiction mailed a survey on the internet listing characteristics to which four or more of the ten criteria constituted a tendency to internet addiction. Of the 400 respondents who were self-diagnosed as extreme internet users, half disclosed a prior history of another addiction. Dr Young reported that similarities of respondents showed a “centralization of use of the internet at the expense of other activities” and “putting priority on maintaining electronic relationships”. Many respondents felt that the electronic relationships were more fulfilling to them than their local relationships, due to similar interests and empathetic tendencies.

Oliver Eggar, a researcher who also posted a questionnaire on the internet to determine internet behaviour, reported that those who identified as addicts had a greater tendency to:-

¨ report negative consequences for their internet use
¨ participate more often in on-line self help groups
¨ feel an urge to use the net when off line
¨ anticipate their next internet usage
¨ feel guilty over their internet usage
¨ lie to friends about how much time they spend on-line
¨ report that colleagues complained about their excessive internet use.

Due to the lack of scientific research in this area, there are some questionable studies. Viktor Brenner noted, on the internet, that there appeared to be an over-representation of researchers and reporters interested in internet addiction that also answered the survey questions. Studies that rely on self-diagnosis often lack a ‘control’ group, whereby the researcher can compare characteristics of internet use and behaviour. Brenner also noted that a large number of users were new to the internet, and hence there would be a tendency for high usage which would not necessarily lead to obsession and addiction.

My observation reveals that there is a lack of substantiated research in this area, with limited and dubious statistical evidence. There is a predominance of anecdotal evidence related to the communication-based functions of the internet, such as the chat rooms and discussion groups, and limited research on the usage rates of the information functions. There is also a lack of studies on personality characteristics of heavy users, such as age, gender and social background, including the length of time a person has been familiar with the internet.

Treatment for internet addiction is therefore haphazard and often similar to treatment for other addictive tendencies, such as gambling. Dr Young maintains that there is a lack of psychologists who are familiar enough with the specific types of internet social interactions to be qualified to formulate a treatment plan for addicts. For example, a person addicted to chat rooms may be different to someone accessing weather details or pornography fifty times a day. The internet provides stimulation for both cognitive and emotional needs, but for some people these needs may become exaggerated and dependent. With no hard evidence, the current extent of internet dependence and addiction may only be the tip of the iceberg. The global social and ethical implications may reach titanic proportions in the future.