• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

An 18-year-old’s exploration of ‘Internet addiction’ in video

May 14, 2014 By Anne Leave a Comment

In a series of man-on-the-street interviews, one young woman’s answer to the question, “Do you think you’re addicted to the Internet?” was: “Yes…. Twitter. I can’t get off of it.” Another responded, “I love creeping on Facebook. I never post; I’m just always creeping, creeping, creeping [also called “lurking,” looking at people’s comments, likes, photos, etc.].” A third said, “I just run to the videos, the weirdest videos. I can spend all night watching them.”

Eoin CorbettBut 18-year-old Irish filmmaker Eoin (sounds like “Owen”) Corbett went a lot deeper for his 20-min. documentary Internet Addiction and Me. He also asked this question of himself – before and after completely unplugging from the Internet for 30 days – and of three friends, who agreed to participate in the experiment and each stay totally offline for a week.

He started his Net-free month thinking, “I’m probably more addicted than I think I am,” and I won’t spoil the ending, but what he discovered was both a bit complicated and definitely anti-climactic. He realized he’d “built it up in my head as being a bigger thing than it really is.” That probably has a lot to do with how the society and media culture around him have represented “the Internet” to him and his peers (not much different from US society). So both complicated and anti-climactic is about right, because the Internet is so many different things and its use so very individual (see this about youth-and-social-media researcher danah boyd’s book It’s Complicated).

Seeking an expert’s perspective

Eoin also took his investigation to the CyberPsychology Research Center, where psychologist Ciaran McMahon told him “we really don’t know what it [the Internet] is yet.” He took Eoin back to the mid-’90s, when the conversation about Internet addiction started, pointing out how much the Net has changed since then. “Every day it’s different,” Dr. McMahon said, “you never go back to the same Internet twice…. Maybe we’re not talking about ‘Internet addiction’,” he added, suggesting that what people may actually be referring to is impulse control.

What Eoin really comes away from this interview at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin (coming back to it at the end of his film) is the importance of presence. McMahon told him, “When you’re in a social situation, and I think it’s really important for parents of young children to establish a rule that the people in front of you are more important than the people on the Internet.”

Eoin’s own exploration turned up very little evidence of the impulse control problem McMahon referred to. He was a little surprised to find he didn’t actually miss being online much during his month away.

Watching ‘the weirdest stuff’ on TV

On the entertainment side, he did at first find that he missed the way the Net allowed him to tailor it so exactly to his own interests. He found that TV simply took over where “the Internet” left off during his month away. “I find myself watching the weirdest stuff, the stupidest stuff … all this stuff I have no interest in, watching it just because it’s on” (doesn’t this sound a little like our mass-media childhoods?)…. I’m watching Ice Road Truckers. I’m not interested in ice or the road or truckers, but [ever the optimist] it should be good.”

Ten days into his month offline, he asks his parents what they’re seeing. You can barely hear them, but the upshot seems to be that they like having him around – downstairs watching TV (somewhat ironically while they’re in the next room watching not Netflix not TV) rather than upstairs in his room.

So this was interesting. There seems to be a trade-off in entertainment now that’s pretty common but not given much thought: The more customized or tailored to you your entertainment is, the more solitary it is. Even with Eoin off the Net and downstairs, his parents aren’t watching TV with him. Their entertainment interests are different, and they’re opting for those on a screen in the next room.

The value of stopping to think on it

Eoin’s friends – Aoife, Adam and Lia – illustrated how individual entertainment (not just Internet use) is too. During their week away, each had a different experience. Aoife was really bored because her No. 1 form of entertainment is socializing with friends online, and she had to lay off that. Lia focused more on how backed up she got with her schoolwork because it was so dependent on Net use, while Adam found his school-related productivity increased. Lia also found that she talked with people in person more “and everything’s a bit more relaxed, slow-paced.”

Clearly, the one value that they all derived was stopping to think about it. They all seemed to appreciate what they learned about themselves as well as technology upon taking the opportunity to stop and reflect. Besides Dr. McMahon’s comment on presence, that’s probably everybody’s top take-away. It’s the reflection (and articulation) part of experiences online or offline that turn them into experiential learning. Unplugging is fine, but it’s not the goal. It’s the means to the kind of learning and reflection that increase self-awareness, one of the five social-emotional competencies that contribute to academic, personal and social success.

Were Eoin ever to read this review, my only suggestion would be to redo the first 25 seconds – cut right to, “Can I, a self-professed Internet addict, live without the Internet for 30 days?” Because starting with “Internet addiction is becoming a serious problem, especially for young people” is starting with a hypothesis based on a widely accepted fear that has become a cliché. Good for you for investigating that for yourself, Eoin! You turned that introductory statement into a question in the rest of your film, why not question it right from the start, rather than restate a cliche? Maybe parents and educators will take a cue and challenge that statement too. [Thanks to my friend and colleague Tito de Morais of MiudoSegurosNa.net in Portugal for pointing Eoin’s video out.]

Related links

  • About how impossible generalizations about the social part of the Internet are – or even the Facebook part (a very readable, informal review of the research literature by a psychologist writing in The New Yorker)
  • “This Examined Life: The Upside of Self-Knowledge for Interpersonal Relationships”
  • The Chicago-based Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning on what SEL is
  • “‘Internet addiction’: New ‘disorder’ about age-old needs?”
  • About addiction references in the videogame discourse
  • “Dealing with distraction with the HELP of digital environments”
  • “Puzzling over ‘Internet addiction'”
  • “‘SIGNS’ of Internet addiction” – interview with a psychiatrist and much more on the subject at NetFamilyNews
Share Button

Filed Under: addiction, Risk & Safety, Social Media, Youth Tagged With: CyberPsychology Research Center, digital sabbath, Dr. Ciaran McMahon, Eoin Corbett, experiential learning, Facebook, Internet addiction, presence, Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, self-awareness, Social Media, twitter, unplugging

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.