Montreal Social Media

I remember myself two weeks ago leaving for a 15 days vacation and wondering if I’m gonna be able to make it. The challenge was real: living without any online connection while enjoying an hiking/camping trip in the beautiful national parks of Banff and Jasper both in the Canadian Rockies.

Am I addicted to the internet?

Considering the fact that my work requires that I spend minimum 8 hrs a day logged to the net and that the first thing that I do when coming back from work is turning on my computer, I would say that it might seem that I have some kind of cyberaddiction. While addictions can be healthy, unhealthy, or a mixture of both, according to the experts, the situation becomes pathological when you start neglecting important things in your life because of this behavior. The problem with this so-called addiction not yet recognized by the DSM-IV (the bible for all symptoms and treatments of mental disorders) is that, like Dr Nathan Shapira states, individuals that exhibit problematic internet use often suffer from other psychiatric disorders. Let’s just think about what people are doing besides of working on the net: adult entertainment, online casinos, gaming, social networking; these paterns of behavior can easily be associate with problems that people might also face into the offline world.

Another point of view on the topic is the one from Kim Young, who became an authority in this field and thinks that cyberaddiction is a real disorder. Young wrote an important article that became a reference in cyberaddiction, she even gives a short exercise with questions to answers that will give you a rough idea if you are considered as dependents. So is CyberAddiction real, who knows? Like many things coming from the web, I guess it’s too soon to tell.

What do you do when you are on vacation?
Back to my two weeks challenge: No I didn’t made it! After a full week without any connection, I had to go check my credit card balance and my banking services… I took also the time to go through (really quickly) some of my emails. Besides this 10 minutes rush, I felt ok for another full week. Anyway, what’s the worst from being apart from the online world? Yes I’ve feared that when I’ll be back everybody would have changed from twitter to identi.ca but it didn’t quite happen (I mean not yet). I’ve also lost all my karma points but think that I’ll take the opportunity to leave plurk, BTW anybody wants my plurkbuddy twitter account? So what did I missed really, Praized has finally launched their API, bravo to you guys. What else? I guess I’ll see when I’ll catch up with the 1000+ stories waiting for me into my feed reader.

Further info on Cyberaddiction and Pathological Internet Use

Internet Addiction:the emergence of a new clinical disorder by Kimberly S. Young (University of Pittsburgh)
Is the Internet Addictive, or Are Addicts Using the Internet? by King, S. A. (1996)
Computer and Cyberspace Addiction by Suler, J. (2004)
Healthy and Pathological Internet Use by John Suler, CyberPsychology and Behavior, 2, 385-394, 1999
Internet Addiction Disorder: Causes, Symptoms,and Consequences by Jennifer R. Ferris, Psychology, Virginia Tech
“On the Internet No One Knows I’m an Introvert”: Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Internet Interaction by Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Galit Wainapel, Shaul Fox. CyberPsychology & Behavior. April 1, 2002

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