DiPot: Ice Tea tech » News

PCs and the Internet: Addiction Magnets or just Tools?

ageor — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:44:38 +0000

The traditional Media (at least in Greece, where I live) don’t treat computing nor the Internet right. I don’t know if it’s because of ignorance or because they feel threatened by it. However, I do get the impression that, most of the time, when radio, TV or the press mention PCs and/or the Internet it’s because of a child pornography site, computer fraud or how young people are getting addicted to it.

According to WikiPedia’s “Addiction” article: “… The term addiction is also sometimes applied to compulsions that are not substance-related, such as problem gambling and computer addiction. In these kinds of common usages, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences, as deemed by the user him self to his or hers individual’s health, mental state or social life. …”.

I’ve had various discussions with intelligent people who are not well acquainted to computers nor the Internet and they express concerns about its use and hidden dangers in it, especially if they are parents. The concern that “kids, teenagers or people who use their, usually networked, PC for long hours are addicted” is overrated and exaggerated.

From Wikipedia’s “Internet addiction disorder” article: “… To the extent that the Internet is a social medium instead of an object, people cannot be addicted to it. The analogy is made to an environment: a person can not be truly addicted to living in a favorite town (no matter how distressing a change of home might be), and a goldfish can not be addicted to living in a pond.
Secondly, it is widely recognized, even by its supporters, that most if not all “Internet addicts” already fall under existing, legitimate diagnostic labels. For many patients, overuse or inappropriate use of the Internet is merely a manifestation of their depression, anxiety, impulse control disorders, or pathological gambling. In this criticism, IAD is compared to food addiction, in which patients overeat as a form of self-medication for depression, anxiety, etc., without actually being truly addicted to eating.
It is possible that a person could have a pathological relationship with a specific aspects of the Internet, such as bidding on online auctions, viewing pornography, online gaming, or online gambling (which is included under the existing Pathological Gambling), but that does not make the Internet medium itself be addictive. …”.

People spending way too much time “in” the Internet is a misconception dated back to the time we needed to dial-in to the Internet. While connected to the Net over telephone lines the meter was running, hence the need to make the most out of it. Broadband has changed this. We are now “online” all the time for a flat rate, or, at worst, for a pay-as-you-go rate (especially true in cellular telephony). In these early days, we got online specifically to use the Internet, mainly use email, surf the Web and, if advanced enough, to do some instant messaging and e-shopping.

Today, thanks, in part, to digital convergence and the computer becoming a consumer item, we have one PC each instead of one per office or home and we do online pretty much anything we did before the Internet existed at all. Thanks to broadband, the phrase “I am connected” doesn’t mean much any more, because we are online whether we actually make use of the Net or not. Sometimes we are practically online and we don’t even realize it (most high end cellular phones are a click away from the Internet)! We have blended it in our everyday life like the telephone, the radio, the TV, the newspaper, the typewriter, the tape recorder etc. before it.

Except for physical activities (debatable; have you tried Nintendo Wii Fit?), computers, possibly connected to the Internet, are used today for prety much everything else. Today, even more than in the earlier days, neither computing nor using the Internet are activities by themselves. They are just enablers for countless individual activities (the following is by no means a complete list, or in any particular order):

Reading, Watching, Listening to Multimedia Documents
Reading, Watching and Listening to our own or others’ material includes art, essays, news, books (electronic and audio), presentations, schematics, photos, music, videos, radio & TV broadcasts, podcasts, etc. or any combination of those and more.
Research
Whether it is scientific or market research, online computers are the tools behind it that collect, store, index, process, search, retrieve, distribute and present all the information and data in ways limited only by imagination.
Multimedia Documents Creation
Most (or all?) of this so-called “content” we can view, we can also create ourselves for us and others to view or use.
Communication & Social Networking
Email, Instant Messaging (IM), VoIP telephony, Video calls, Audio & Video Conferencing are just some types of online communication. Social Networking helps keep in touch with lots of people. Additionally, (micro)Blogging and RSS feeds help us get input from and address potentially unlimited content creators and audience, respectively.
Recreation & Games
Physical activity aside, electronic editions of traditional board games represent only a small fraction of the games we can play with practically unlimited human or computer opponents from around the globe.

It’s not my intention to prove how good technology is; there may be issues in all applications that leave room for discussion. I am trying to raise awareness to the fact that computer and Internet usage cannot be measured as an activity on their own, as they are not. They represent the sum of all their individual uses. Of course (networked) computing (possibly as life itself) is a platform where addictions can occur. Like all drugs are not inherently addictive, nor is technology, computing or the Internet. Still, ‘… With the widespread use of computers in the 21st century, it may be difficult to distinguish users who are “highly engaged” in their computer use from those who might be considered “addicted”. …’ (from Wikipedia’s “Computer addiction” article).

Diversity and multiple activities & interests have always been factors against addictions. Having a tools combination like a computer networked to the all-inclusive Internet actually promotes diversity. Let’s do so, too.

PS. There are studies indicating computer and internet “addiction” or “overuse”. At this point (and I am no expert), I believe many people use or overuse them like they do with any new, shiny toy. Once they both become commonplace, like the telephone and television did, any “related” addiction will be easily traced to the pre-technology causes.

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

Green IT Services : Catalyst for Cost Optimization – IT articles, Hardware & Software, Computer vendors in India, IT industry in India : Latest IT News

ageor — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:02:04 +0000

“According to a recently released global enterprise survey, India is a world leader in green IT potential. The Indian respondents scored over others in expecting to pay 5% or more for green technology if its benefits for the environment and return on investment (ROI) are proven. Green technology is technology with efficient power consumption, reusable packaging, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, recycling offers for older equipment, use of non-toxic materials, or making investments in future green concepts such as alternative materials. …”
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.itvoir.com/portal/boxx/knowledgebase.asp?iid=1406&Cat=23

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

RSS Bandit

ageor — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:37:32 +0000

Synchronizes Feeds with Google Reader and NewsGator Online
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://rssbandit.org/

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

Nίκος Δήμου

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:38 +0000

Nίκος Δήμου
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.ndimou.gr/newsarticle_gr.asp?news_id=338

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

Viral Marketing Principles: Six Key Rules To Get Everyone To Talk About Your Idea – Robin Good’s Latest News

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:38 +0000

Viral Marketing Principles: Six Key Rules To Get Everyone To Talk About Your Idea – Robin Good’s Latest News
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.masternewmedia.org/viral-marketing-principles-six-key-rules/

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

Google News Blog: Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:37 +0000

Google News Blog: Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eight-ways-to-help-google-news-better.html

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

HERMES – Homepage

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:37 +0000

“Navigate in the Hellenic government portal “ERMIS” and take advantage of the published news, the offered services, the frequently asked questions and the useful links under the categories you will choose.”… In Greek also
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.ermis.gov.gr/portal/page/portal/ermis/

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

How to Make Money with Your Blog Site – Robin Good’s Latest News

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:36 +0000

How to Make Money with Your Blog Site – Robin Good’s Latest News
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.masternewmedia.org/2005/02/07/how_to_make_money_with.htm

Possibly related posts (auto generated)

News Reading Thoughts

ageor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:46:27 +0000

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!