Abstract: Computer Addiction

The sudden addition of the Internet to the already massive array of those information resources available through the power of computing. However, with those resources come risks, and perhaps one of the most subtle risks is that of computer addiction. At first it may seem unusual to juxtapose a word representing a technological marvel and a word representing "a habit so strong that one cannot give it up" (Webster's Concise Dictionary). The phenomenon does exist however, and already carries a chain of resources such as computer addiction phone lines and Interneters Anonymous. Our project will try to examine people who suffer from this affliction, catalog some of the resources available to help them, and try to determine what it is about the allure of computing that sometimes captures people so strongly that they "cannot give it up."

Computer addiction is not an entirely new phenomenon. Popular stereotypes of the mousy young hacker locked in his or her room all day playing computer games abound. In the Internet Age this stereotype persists, except that the mousy young hackers now either explore the boundless new worlds that exist in Multi-User Domains (MUDs) or spend their time breaking into commercial and military computers around the world. This is the newer generation of computer addicts, as seen in the public's eye, popularized by movies such as "War Games." However, the advent of the World Wide Web as a popular medium broke down the inaccessibility of earlier systems, so that one no longer had to learn hundreds of cryptic commands or spend hours staring at screens full of text to use a computer. The newest breed of addicts lose themselves in the user friendly interfaces and the multimedia presentations, but due to the youth of the Web they have not yet been given a popular stereotype - and popular culture has been able to pretend that they do not exist. This blindness cannot remain for long however, since computer addiction via the Internet suddenly requires only a modem and Netscape, rather than extensive computer eduction, and the population that may suffer from it is no longer restricted to the mousy young hackers.

However, in parallel with the quantum increase in the at-risk population has been a quantum increase in the areas of computing in which people can lose themselves. Although faster computers and the WWW have increased the accessibility of computer-related information, the features that seem to be the most responsible for addiction are the sheer amount of the available data and the constantly changing nature of that data. Users can spend hours on the Web and never see a given page twice, then come back two days later and expect to find new information. It is the MUD, however, that is the oldest, best developed model that we have, although its text based nature has restricted it to a smaller culture in the past. Many of the virtual worlds created in MUDs are just as endless and ever-changing as the Web, but they have been around for long enough to have generated long term addiction that the Web cannot yet match. A character named Kyser on the "End of the Line MUD" claims that even casual users spend around 2 hours a day immersed in their alter egos. Recent technologies will allow those two hours to be spent in three dimensional multimedia worlds of sound and movement, so that users no longer need to be able to imagine their Multi-User Shared Hallucinations (MUSHs, an alternate form of MUDs) based on cryptic text on a screen. How many more will become addicted, going beyond interested exploration and losing themselves in these new worlds? With stories abounding of people who have spent stretches of 44 out of 48 hours logged in or who have missed their flights home for Christmas because they couldn't bring themselves to logout, the Internet community must become aware of this subtle risk that accompanies their National Information Infrastructure and learn to avoid the pitfalls.

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