In America, the average Internet user spends 21 hours per week cyber-surfing with internet addiction reportedly affecting a mere 10% of the population. I say “mere” because I know only a few Americans who are not surfing their days (or nights) away. I believe people are people regardless of race and I find it difficult to believe that Asian races would have a higher proclivity for Internet addiction than other races. Therefore, if a survey conducted by a Shanghai-based cyber addiction rectification center on Shanghai teenagers stands true, the American statistic is much, much too low.
The cyber addiction rectification center’s director, Guo Tiejun released survey findings of 2,125 random students from 34 middle schools, 8 senior middle schools, 8 vocational schools and 18 junior middle schools. The findings report that boys are more susceptible to computer addiction – a finding that American studies concur with – with nearly 15% of Shanghai teenagers showing the impact and affects of computer addiction. Guo suggests that strengthening education of teenagers in junior middle schools may help reduce the incidences of cyber addiction.
A study conducted at Stanford University suggests that 17% of use spend more than 40 hours a week online. Be it for work or entertainment my head says, “Wow! That’s crazy, who’d waste their day away like that?” But, as I sit here writing this article I realize that the Internet has integrated into the way we live and conduct our lives. Our families no longer own a set of hardbound Encyclopedias. Our children and indeed we ourselves do all of our research in cyberspace. We read books online. In fact, we by E-books that we have to print out for ourselves or simply read straight off our monitors. We don’t need to go to television to get our news which may or may not, depending on your viewpoint, be slanted. We can go online and read the story from perspectives other than our own. And speaking of television, we can watch television and movies on our computers. We chat with strangers we will never meet and email our loved ones who we really should be telephoning and visiting with in person.
And games, wow… addiction is in their programming.
So who spends 40 hours a week in front of a computer? I do, my husband does, and my adolescent son (playing games) does. We are all on course to become a part of this statistic if we do not watch ourselves and schedule/restrict computer time as we do our television time. Computer addiction will easily become an epidemic within our lifetime. Don’t let the repercussions hurt your family. Spend quality time with your loved ones every day before you wake up one day and realize you no longer know the people who are your heart.
