Look At That: Internet Addicts May Be Curing Themselves

Studies

from the maybe-it's-not-such-a-problem-after-all... dept

We’ve recently been making fun of some people’s addiction to saying people are addicted to various technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. Finally, a new “study” suggests that (as many people have pointed out), maybe this isn’t such a big problem after all. Instead, this Korean study found that so-called internet addiction appeared to be on the decline. You would think, given all of the hype about how horrible internet addiction is, that this fact would lead the story. Nope. Instead, the story focuses on how those (dwindling) internet addicts are likely to be sleep deprived — which hardly seems like a point worth noting at all. Of course, you can find fault with this study, such as the fact that the way they determined who was addicted to the internet was to simply ask people if they were addicted or not — which seems likely to not lead to particularly accurate results. Still, it would not be at all surprising if it were true that those who tend to be bigger users of the internet would find themselves less “addicted” over time as they learned how to manage their internet usage patterns as well (and, of course, once the addicts have reached last page of the internet there really isn’t that much more to do online, anyway).