The Chinese have defined Internet addiction and apparently all of us have it. The following article comes to us from PC World:
“Users who spend six hours or more per day online, and exhibit at least one symptom including difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to be online, irritation, and mental or physical distress are classified as meeting the definition of addiction.”
It’s a fairly short article, but Internet addiction clinics and halfway-houses abound throughout China. Considering that Chinese addicts haven’t been obsessively checking their email since 1995, it makes me wonder how much better off the U.S. would be (meaning productive) if the country took a collective week-long stay in one of these clinics.
“About 10 percent of China’s 253 million Internet users exhibit some form of addiction to the medium, and 70 percent of those people are young men.”
The image and text below are from a Washington Post article written in 2007:
A 12-year-old boy is treated with a series of low-voltage shocks in a therapy that doctors at an Internet addiction clinic in China say helps patients sleep better.
(By Greg Baker — Associated Press)
I think I have found a new calling… Internet Addiction Therapy Specialist. I will make people enrolled in my program go to nothing but bad web sites until it breaks them of their addiction. If that doesn’t work, out come the cattle prods.
