How Can We Prevent Computer Addiction?

How Can We Prevent Computer Addiction?

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How do we know whom to blame?

One of the major difficulties with the phenomenon of computer addiction is trying to decide who to hold responsible. With substance addiction people can blame the drug dealers and crime rings and with compulsive gambling one can blame the casinos and their money hungry owners. The public seems to need a well-defined enemy on whom to blame (the evils of an addiction in order to fire their imaginations. However, computer addiction does not readily offer any obvious scheming villains who can be held responsible for the addicted students who fail out of school or the Internet fanatics who lose their spouses. Yet, if someone could be found who was responsible, people may take the problem more seriously and begin to find a way to destroy the problem at its roots. This search for the roots of the problem must inevitably start with the people most directly responsible for the availibility of addictive products -- the programming industry and the service providers.

  • Programming Industry and Service Providers: Guilty?

    Programmers seem to hold a position almost analagous to drug dealers, in that they are the most obvious reason that the addictive substance is available to the public. Unlike most drug dealers, however, people can actually blame programmers for making the substance addictive to begin with. It is their job to produce products that are as hypnotic and enthralling as possible, and many companies even advertise their products as addictive. On their web page, a company named LavaMind quoted the words of a customer who had asked "WHY IS THIS THING SO DAMNED ADDICTIVE?" and went on to say "I love it. Finish [making the next game] so I can just stay home permanently glued to my computer" [28]. Although mostwould quickly criticize the author of the quote as someone well on the way to addiction, perhaps a more fundamental question to ask would be to wonder why LavaMind considers this advertising material. By advertising their finest games as "DAMNED ADDICTIVE," software companies make it entirely clear that this is what their programmers strive to achieve. However, beyond the possible culpability of programmers striving to make their games addictive lies the question of whether or not Internet Service providers can be held guilty for their inaction in trying to solve a problem that they know exists better than anyone else. Who better knows the incredible lengths of time that people spend logged in than those who run the system that these people log on to or through? However, though "even the most ardent supporters of interactive computer communication . . . admit that those programs produce a steady trickle of addicts, nobody seems to be rushing to stop them from spreading" [18]. Are the service providers and the universities that provide Net access, or the people who provide MUD and WWW servers, responsible for that "steady trickle of addicts" that lose themselves in Cyberspace?

  • Programming Industry and Service Providers: Not Guilty.

    Given that the programmers and service providers are the people who have the power to pull the plug on the addiction, at first it seems reasonable to consider them somewhat guilty -- at least of neglect. However, two things stand in their favor and protect them from public cynosure:

    1. Unrestricted access and high-quality software are desirable for those of us not prone to Computer Addiction.
    2. Computer addiction is an addiction, and those likely to be susceptible to it are people with addictive tendencies.

    People seem to feel that although "they're very seductive, programs like Internet Relay Chat and Multi-User Dimensions can do a great deal of good" [28], and this general attitude makes point (1) a fairly uncontroversial one. Users want programmers to continue making hypnotic games, servers to continue to carry fascinating MUDs, and service providers to continue to allow them free access. As MIT professor Sherry Turkle says in an interview,
    "Computers and communication networks are . . . complex media that different people (and different social and political groups for that matter) use in different ways. Yet the notion of addiction seems almost irresistible. X amount of heroin use is never a good thing; [but] the same amount of Internet activity can be a helpful or a hurtful thing, depending on the content of the messages and the role of the activity in the life of the person doing it."

    As long as the "role of [using the Net] in the life of the person doing it" is not addiction, Turkle seems to agree that these resources are valuable to the greater part of society. Harriet Rossetto, the defense attorney for Kevin Mitnick (one of the more famous of the Internet hackers), claims that Kevin's "behavior is an impulse disorder. The disease is the addiction, whether it be drugs, alcohol, gambling, hacking, money or power" [9]. This famous case, in which the judge agreed that Kevin's problem seemed to require treatment rather than punishment, set the precedent. The addictive areas of the computer world, from games to MUDs to the WWW, all provide an escape for the user from various concerns of everyday life. Addiction to these things is not the fault of the programmers and providers that make them available to potential addicts any more than the government is to blame for allowing people to become 'beach bums' on public beaches. Addictive personalities crave some sort of escape -- and they will find wherever they are able. As the mother of a Net addict says, "He was a candidate for anything along thse lines . . . It could have been alcohol or drugs"[26]. And because it "could have been alcohol or drugs," the programmers and providers cannot be to blame.

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