Internet Makes You Sick and Dumb

In an extensive study conducted in Taiwan over 49,609 randomly selected students from 156 Universities were asked in an online survey about their internet use habits. This study was conducted by Ying-Fang Chen, M.A. and Samuel S. Peng, Ph.D with the scope of understanding the relationship between internet use and academic performance.

 The respondents to this survey were divided in two categories heavy users and non heavy users. Students that spend less than 33.97 hours a week online were classified as non heavy users and those that spent more than 33.97 hours a week online were classified as heavy users. Survey found that students on average spend 17 hours online a week and out of that time: 4.15 hours are spent making new friends, 3.59 hours are spent on academic work, 3.21 hours on non academic related internet searches, and 2.57 hours playing games. 

The survey also found that psychosocial differences between heavy and non heavy users were statistically significant. According to this study heavy internet users are more likely to be depressed, physically ill, and lonely. One explanation for these results could be the fact that the more time you spend online the less time you have to spend in the real world. 

When it comes to academic performance the difference between non heavy internet users and heavy internet users is also statistically significant. Data shows that heavy internet users have lower grades than non heavy internet users. In addition heavy internet users reported difficulties, learning, studying, completing assignments and getting enough sleep. As before one possible explanation is the fact that the more time you spend online the less time you have to spend on academic life.

 In conclusion heavy internet use will not only impact your academic life but also your physiological and psychological well being.

-Oleg Frunza

Works Cited

Ying-Fang, Chen, and Samuel S. Peng. "University Students' Internet Use And Its Relationships With Academic Performance, Interpersonal Relationships, Psychosocial Adjustment, And Self-Evaluation." Cyberpsychology & Behavior 11.4 (2008): 467-469. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Mar. 2013.

Do you know that some online gamers have died of Internet addiction? by Lissy Craton

Internet addiction is not just about playing games. Internet addiction is not just about using Internet. Internet addiction is a fatal addiction in certain cases. That is the case, where many internet cafes around the world are full of people of all ages spending  hours playing online games.

The worst consequence of Internet addiction is death. However, internet addiction can disrupt your life in other ways. For example:

2010:

South Korea was reminded of the tragic consequences of gaming addiction when a couple was found guilty of starving their real-life baby to death while they raised a healthy virtual child in an internet cafe. The father, Kim Jae-beom 41, was sentenced to two years in prison in May after admitting to neglecting their three-month-old daughter Sa-rang – "love" in Korean – while he and his wife spent up to 12 hours a day at a PC bang playing a 3D fantasy game called Prius Online his 25 year-old, Kim Yum-jeong was expecting their second child by the time she was given a suspended 2-year sentence. 

2011:

Wang Gang, 31  who had dropped out of college and cut himself off from his family, had been addicted to Dungeon Fighter, a South Korean multiplayer game which is hugely popular among China's burgeoning online community.

Online multi-user games started in the late 1970's with the restricted concept of competition between two players. It evolved over the years, as technological advancement resulted in better hardware and software systems. Hence what started as a text based adventures has today become Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG).

MMORPG has factors that motivate gamers to continuously interact with other gamers in order to achieve goals and be engage with their virtual lives 

I infer that creating and living through an avatar reward gamers for what they haven't accomplished in their lives. Unfortunately, gamers don't consider the consequences behind this scenario. In addition, is shocking to see how new and more progressive technology have negatively changed society.

Baby's death, Addiction, MMORPG, Games

Outside Time or Internet Time? What Teens are Choosing Today

Do you remember back in the day when you would drive through a neighborhood and every kid on the street was playing outside?  Times have changed drastically since then.  Nowadays, if you were to drive through that same neighborhood, you may be lucky to find a few kids playing outside.  The internet is somewhat to blame for that.  After teens and young adults come home from school, most of them go straight to playing video games, checking Facebook or other social networks, or surfing the internet.   With internet addiction being fairly new, some parents don’t know the signs of internet addiction.  There are steps parents can take to help break their teen’s addiction.  

According to the helpguide.org under the internet and computer addiction article, parents need to be a cautious as to how they approach dealing with a teen’s addiction to the internet.  One of the biggest setbacks of the addiction is that the teen’s skills including emotions and social skills are not up to par because they spend so much time online and don’t have that human interaction.  One way helpguid.org suggests to help reduce internet addiction is to encourage other interests and social activities.  Community sports teams, and Scouts can greatly improve these skills that teens miss from being on the internet all the time.  It helps teens and young adults stay active both mentally and physically because they have to work as a team to get an end result.  These activities also help build a person’s confidence and human interaction skills that cannot be taught on the internet.  Granted there also may be some underlying issues as to why a teen stays on the internet for a long time, but being in a group setting may help with resolving those issues.  Also, the teen or young adult may look up to a coach or leader than can impact their life.  These life lessons are very hard to learn on the internet, but something has to be done to help reduce the amount of teens addicted to the internet.

-Lauren Gorowski

Source: http://www.helpguide.org/mental/internet_cybersex_addiction.htm

Decreased Productivity: Is the Internet to Blame?

Internet Addiction in the workplace has impacts on employee performance as well as the companies those employees work for. The less productive an employee is the organization as a whole will suffer, deadlines will be missed, and profits lost. It may sound awful enough, especially to those who maybe in a managerial or supervisory role, but is the Internet the sole proprietor to addiction, or are there other factors that contribute to workers being less productive and more dependent on the Internet?

Multitasking is a skill that many people possess. Some can perform multiple tasks at one time better than others, but can multitasking actually contribute to decreased productivity? Can the act of trying to be more efficient negatively impact the amount of work one can accomplish during a given period of time? The answer is yes, multitasking can actually cause the mind to lose focus of objectives and goals of their work. The more tasks a person has at one time can cause distraction, the feeling of being overwhelmed, and gives rise to the need for an escape. In the workplace, people turn to the Internet for their escape, there they have access to endless amounts of information. Studies have shown that a simple Internet search can lead to an employees production rate falling to 28% due in part to the amount of time it takes to refocus and reorganize their minds.

Internet Addiction in the workplace is not just influenced by the access of the Internet being available in so many platforms, but it is also contributed to by the environment in the workplace and the employee's work habits. The solution some have imposed of monitoring or limiting Internet usage may be effective in some cases, but it would be more effective to reduce the employees needs for distractions and encourage more productivity through a more hospitable work environment. Of course this is just one approach and as more is learned about Internet addiction, clear and sound approaches to minimizing the addiction in the workplace will be created and implemented.

Source:
GARY M., STERN. "Removing The Curse Of Internet Addiction." Investors Business Daily 08 Feb. 2010: A09. Business Source Complete. Web. 1 Mar. 2013.

Internet Addiction Symptoms Test

With internet addiction cases on the rise all over the world, people everywhere are asking the same question. What are the symptoms and how do they know when or if to seek some help? To answer this question was Dr. Kimberly Young. She has been leading the research on internet addiction sense the late 90's and has even developed a simple test to help people figure out how much they are using the internet. Dr. Young has narrowed down internet addiction to eight main symptoms, five of which are needed to be dignosed. The eight are very similar to other addiction problems and include a tolerance build up, failed attempts to stop using the internet, mood swings while not on the internet, loss of critical relationships, and even using the internet as an escape from daily life.

So I did some digging and found a common test that is currently being used to help people find out if they do have a problem or just spend a little extra time online. Oddly enough the best way to take this test is via the internet. It is fun to take and see how the center rates your online use. So take a few minutes and click on the link below to see how you rank!

-Austin Oys

http://www.netaddiction.com/index.php?option=com_bfquiz&view=onepage&catid=46&Itemid=106

Internet Addiction: "The new E-Illness" by Lissy Craton

When the Internet was launched, its creators couldn't predict the negative consequences that it would bring to daily life. Over the years, Internet Addiction has become a compulsive mental disorder in which the overuse of the internet causes people around the world to spend endless hours surfing on the web neglecting their families and friends.

Internet Addiction was originally proposed as a disorder in a satirical hoax by Ivan Goldberg, M.D., in 1995. He took pathological gambling as diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as his model for the description of IAD. In the course of time, Internet Addiction has increased uncontrollably. Furthermore, it will officially be listed in the worldwide manual as a mental illness in may 2013.

In consequence, Internet Addiction affects families around the world without discriminating based on ethnicity, nationality, culture, age or gender. Not even military families, who are supposed to have more disciplined lives, are exempted from this growing societal concern. As Doctor Sharon Cooper, a retired Army colonel and developmental pediatrician, has stated: "Families...need to be warned about internet addiction, because this type of addiction is more common than alcohol addiction and there is no way of knowing it, so many people may be affected without realizing it."

In addition, researchers have identified six main types of Internet Addiction. Specifically, gaming addiction, social networking, online shopping, internet gambling, web surfing, cybersex/porn addiction

Works cited:  New Mental Illness, Internet Addiction, Dr Sharon Cooper

The Impact of Internet on Academic Performance

 ( InternetAddiction)

The internet is a big part of our academic life. It’s almost impossible to imagine being a college student and not using the internet. Students use the internet for research, online course work, and faculty communication.

Research shows that time spent on the internet negatively predicts the GPA(Junco). That being said we can’t solely blame the academic use of internet on poor academic performance. After all we use the internet in our academic life to improve our learning and not to harm it. Let’s be honest you probably don’t know anybody that just can’t leave the Moodle page or is completely submerged in researching an academic topic. We all have our kryptonite, some of us are constantly on Facebook some are on YouTube and others can’t stop online shopping.

For the longest time I thought that by not being part of any social sites I was shielded from wasting time online and having my grades impacted by that. I could not have been more wrong. While I was researching our presentation topic “internet addiction” and how it impacts academic performance I decided to do a personal analysis of internet use and its impact on my academic performance. Although my GPA has not changed I used the final grade as the dependent variable and interestingly enough I found that in 2009 I had 6 subscriptions was watching on average 20 hour a day and my average final grade was a 96.3. Fast-forward to present I have 69 subscriptions I watch on average 90 minutes of YouTube a day and my last semester’s average final grade was  a 92.1. Most shocking to me is the fact that besides one semester my average final grade has been declining and my YouTube use has been constantly increasing. I do understand that there are many other factors that could contribute to my academic decline, like the fact that higher level classes are harder, but the point of this analysis was not to discover something I did not know about myself but to quantify the amount of time I spend on YouTube and the result are worrying.

 My question to you is on what do you spend most of your internet time, and do you think it has any impact on your academic performance? 

-Oleg Frunza

Works Cited

InternetAddiction. Digital image. Http://my.englishclub.com/forum/topics/does-internet-affect-our-lives. EnglishClub, 12 Oct. 2012. Web. 11 Mar. 2013. <http://my.englishclub.com/forum/topics/does-internet-affect-our-liveshttp://my.englishclub.com/forum/topics/does-internet-affect-our-lives>.

Junco, Reynol. "Too Much Face and Not Enough Books: The Relationship between Multiple Indices of Facebook Use and Academic Performance." Computers in Human Behavior 28.1 (2011): 187-98. Print.

Teens Dancing Away Internet Addiction

Out of all the age groups, teenagers are the most susceptible to being addicted to the Internet.   With all the mobile devices easily available today, from smart phones to tablets and hot spots for Wi-Fi; teenagers can access the Web any time and any place they wish.   In South Korea or Hong Kong, it is not unusual to see teenagers with mobile devices in their hands walking down the street or during school.    Being connected to the Internet for that length of time can be damaging to a teenagers brain.  Emotions and judgment are especially affected when a teenager becomes an addict.  There are many different treatments for this type of addiction in teens.

Dance therapy is a form of psychotherapeutic treatment in which the addict boosts their emotions and awareness of their body.  By listening to the music and feeling the rhythm, people who suffer from Internet addiction are able to work on opening their posture and creating more fluid shapes with their bodies.  According to Zhang, a therapist at Inspirees in the Chaoyang district in China, dance therapy “works on the patient’s inner-self rather than projecting external form”, which has a dual purpose of building confidence and self-esteem.  This is particularly important for teens because a majority of the teens are online gamers which affect their school work and possibly part time jobs.  One participant of dance therapy was a seventeen year old boy who was addicted to playing online games because “he felt like a real man when playing internet games, killing bad people by playing the role of the hero.”   After a few sessions of therapy, the teenager’s mother noticed a dramatic difference in his behavior.  The addict was spending less time online and his grades had improved along with his behavior which was calmer.  The music fills the repetitious movements people may get from playing online games without the chance of becoming addicted to the Internet.   This is important for teens because of the age where the treatment could be easier compared to later in life when there is more to think about such as a job, family and providing shelter.

Source:  ALDANE, JACK. “Dance your addiction away.” Global Times 08 Jan. 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2013