Net junkies set for epic fail

THE GASJET today has a stellar article about kids getting ‘addicted to the internet’ and becoming depressed. Well no, it’s not particularly stellar at all but it’s nice to see the Gasjet branching out from being Blackpool Borough Council’s media mouthpiece.

Boffins questioned 1000 Chinese teenagers to gauge whether they became moody if they did not have access to their internet fix. Questions, you guessed it, such as, “do you feel moody or depressed when you go offline?”. Inquisitive.

They concluded that kids that embraced the internet as part of their daily life (condemned as a ‘pathological’ use of the internet in the report) could become depressed if the internet was taken away.

Is this not a fairly obvious conclusion, though? The internet facilitates mass communication, be it via forums, blogs, instant messaging, Skype or Facebook, and it is this aspect that generates a natural dependency. People no longer need to depend on archaic postal services or the telephone when they can type or speak via the internet for what amounts to no cost.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like text speak and I’m not one of these people that lives their life on Facebook, but I accept that many people do. Facebook is the de facto standard for communicating with friends and arranging social events for a significant number of people; the horse has bolted and no amount of scare publications will change that. But it’s also the hive of zero-second information that you just can’t get anywhere else.

Obviously there are also people who predominantly communicate with their circle of friends via the mobile telephone, yet aside from the cancer scare from handset microwaves, phones have become so engrained in society that the first words of many children are no longer ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, but ‘Nokia’ and ‘iPhone’.

Okay, I jest, but phones are definitely one of the first things that children ask their parents to buy them. Even schools tolerate them in classrooms, such is the anticipated negative reaction if they were to be banished.

So where are we going with this? Well, it makes perfect sense that whatever your favoured means of communicating is, if you are cut off from it there is a chance you’ll become fairly miserable. You don’t need to waste loads of money doing a survey to work that out.

Many parents don’t like the fact that their kids are spending more time than they deem ‘normal’ on their computers, but I can fully understand why they do. By their nature children are inquisitive and starving them of information deliberately – as the report seems to want – is only going to generate an increased desire for knowledge.

One option is to go off to the library and thumb through a few battered text books written decades ago, but why would anyone want to do this when the alternative is so much faster, more detailed and more current? Indeed, going to the library these days provides another point of access to the dreaded internet.

It is this reason really that prompts me to think that those conducting these studies decide what they want to find before beginning the study. The internet is part of the fabric of modern society, and biased studies by technophobes that have an intrinsic opposition to communication via keyboard provide little insight into anything.