If this is the first column you turn to each week, you might just be a Net
junky. According to Kimberly Young at Pittsburgh University, people who surf for
more than fours hours a day could easily become mentally ill and need a doctor鈥檚
help (www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990822/drecord/p9s3_935358013.html).
She thinks that constant surfing creates high levels of dopamine in the brain,
which produces an adrenaline kick followed by bouts of depression. Netropolitan
has found that you can largely avoid the terrible lows by not opening the phone
bill.
The very fact that Netheads are commonly referred to as 鈥渦sers鈥� should have
been a dead giveaway already, but now it鈥檚 official. The American Psychological
Association heard about the perils of Net addiction last week. Researchers claim
it might eventually call for the same kind of therapy as alcoholism. This could
be a problem for doctors, however. Online questionnaires suggest that up to six
per cent of Web wanderers are addicts
(http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/netaddiction990823.html).
That鈥檚 11 million people鈥攁 figure that could bring some health services to their knees.
Don鈥檛 despair. There is plenty of self-help advice about going 鈥渃old
modem鈥�. The snag is you have to be logged on to find it. Oops.
(http://members.aol.com/Iainmacn/addicts/ or
http://psychcentral.com/netaddiction/).
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Perhaps true addiction should not be measured by the physiological symptoms
but rather by its consequences. For example, one poor woman in Florida recently
lost a custody battle for her children because of her surfing habit.
If you just can鈥檛 leave your keyboard alone, divorce may be inevitable. But
take comfort鈥攅ven if you can鈥檛 drag yourself away to go to court, at least
you can untie the knot online at www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/20933.html.
