PSYCHOLOGY
In 1995, New York psychiatrist Ivan K. Goldberg facetiously warned of "Internet Addiction Disorder," an affliction involving "voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers." Written as though it were an entry in the DSM-IV - the diagnostic guide used by mental health professionals - Goldberg's parody has taken on a life of its own.
"It was a joke that turned on him," says Maressa Hecht Orzack, psychologist and director of Computer Addiction Services at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. Orzack is one of several mental health experts seriously pushing to have Internet addiction included in the next edition of the DSM, which isn't expected out for several years. "Many of us feel it would be a help if it was recognized as an impulse control disorder," Orzack says.
Another supporter is psychologist David Greenfield, who, in a widely reported survey released last year, claims that a staggering 11 million Internet users are addicts - nearly 6 percent of all people online. "It's a behaviorally based addiction like gambling, and it took 20 years for that to get in," contends Greenfield, president of the Center for Internet Studies, in West Hartford, Connecticut.
But critics have begun to rally opinion against the concept of Net addiction. MIT technology scholar and psychologist Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, recently delivered a cautionary speech to the American Psychological Association on the topic. She worries that the notion of Net addiction closes down crucial questions about why some people go online to work through problems while others use the Net to act out their problems in unconstructive ways. Better to think of the Internet as a Rorschach to be interpreted, she says, than as a narcotic to be avoided.
Turkle disputes the notion that the Net can be addictive in the same way as drug-taking or gambling. "It's a communications medium," she says. "It's not like heroin, which shuts you down and makes you dependent." Besides, she adds, many people on the Net are creating something or contributing to their intellectual or emotional growth. "You don't see compulsive poetry-writing or sculpting in the DSM-IV."
Goldberg, who inadvertently sparked the debate, still thinks Internet addiction is a subject more worthy of parody than study. "It's just that people have sucky lives or sucky marriages," he says. "They end up turning toward work. The Internet is no more addicting than work."
MUST READ
The Micro Browser War
The Tax Man Dot-Cometh
The Net Addiction Addiction
Ask Dr. Bob
Ethernet Unbound
Engage Holographic Drive Now
Beam Me Up, Voxar
People
Jargon Watch
The Longest Yard
Net Softwear
You-Boat
Serf Engine
Making the Waves
Raw Data
