Internet Addiction

i've described this anxiety to my parents and they can't relate at all. they use smartphones and facebook and whatever but it's not enough a part of their lives to have become seductive or dysfunctional. they're just tools that they use, not environments they get lost in.

I think our generation is caught in the middle. Your parents - like mine - use the Internet like a tool set. For people born today "the Internet" probably won't be an "environment" to get lost in because it's so engrained in life.

We're screwed, basically.

whenever i find myself with no internet access i wonder how i'm going to pass the time, then i have a great time reading and listening to records and otherwise doing low-key worthwhile and productive things, and feel that i should certainly do this more often, and then as soon as i have internet access again it's back to endless twitter and fb and ilx

"Think in most ways regarding the internet, kids today have the advantage that the "internet" isn't an alien entity"

think the internet is probably better off as an alien entity tbh

whenever i find myself with no internet access i wonder how i'm going to pass the time, then i have a great time reading and listening to records and otherwise doing low-key worthwhile and productive things, and feel that i should certainly do this more often, and then as soon as i have internet access again it's back to endless twitter and fb and ilx

rueful otm

Btw my stayfocused experiment lasted a good week then i started slipping into incognito to avoid it -_-

I think it's going to be very interesting to see what the children of today will do with the internet. They'll be the first generation that didn't have the opportunity to be straight up blindsided by this unbelievable technology; as has been said upthread, it was always there. My two year old cannot quite read or type yet but she has no problem browsing youtube on a touchscreen, finding content I didn't even know about (look at the view counter for videos containing "play doh surprise eggs"!)

i'm of same generation as treeship and (i think) bateau and i wouldn't describe myself as having been 'blindsided' by the internet and it never felt like 'something hi-tech sci-if dreamlike Jetsons thing that became reality out of nowhere during our lifetime'. started watching flash cartoons, going on chatrooms and aim around fourth grade but i was aware of its existence even before then. i think kids today are just as fucked as us. my cousin age 13 is addicted to the internet, first via minecraft (including watching videos of other people playing minecraft) but now she even like goes to buzzfeed dot com and reads lists

the internet getting shittier and noisier has probably been the best thing for breaking my internet habit. once i disconnect i don't feel much compulsion to constantly check in on it any more. turning twitter etc off just feels like sweet relief now.

when i compulsively use the internet it's to avoid stuff i don't want to deal with, and not using the internet has still left me with stuff i don't want to deal with.

haha otm. the ridiculous endless rounds of clicking i engage in when i procrastinate don't have anything to do with the internet per se, they're to do with procrastination and if the internet isn't there i just find even more pointless ways of procrastinating.

i took a lot of time out from the internet. now i engage with it at work, then switchg off when i leave the office, but sometimes this is harder than i hoped. its also why i hate streaming services. i cant watch online TV without thinking about looking at something else.

the main prob ive found with the net is the same one as before, theres so much to read, once you see it all, you feel like youre missing out/losing out/getting out of touch by not reading it. but now i just print out pieces i want to read and read them later. i cant read anything properly at work, shuttling between actual work and websites.

https://twitter.com/noz/status/725194524750958592

i hope future generations will think of the internet and social media the way we do smoking today

i think a better reference point would be television. i think most people would think it was a problem if they spent many hours a day channel surfing but it's considered more acceptable to do that on the web.

I don't do much internet browsing these days. Most of the internetting I do is fairly utilitarian aside from ILX-ing and some news trawling (almost all of which I do during work hours). Extracting myself from social media and the WWW equivalent of channel flipping was nothing but helpful. Still use the damn thing too much, though.

have there been any songs about net addiction?

waiting for michael franti to record an update of 'television... the drug of the nation'.

I was thinking back the other day to a time when I used to write like a machine every day and wondering what happened to make me break that habit and, oh yeah, of course it was before I owned a laptop and a smartphone and a tablet.

ILX is the only place on the internet I really like, and serves as a decent filter for the rest. I'd be overwhelmed as a Twitter user. But even this is mainly procrastination, and I ought to be doing work or reading books instead.

I think my biggest problem stems from the fact that my job heavily uses the internet and browser-based subscription sources. Over the years, I have grown deeply bored and dissatisfied with my job and I spend more and more of the day browsing message boards and going down rabbit-holes on the net. If I don't find a way to change, I imagine eventually I'll probably get fired or something. I still manage to live up to the requirements of my job for now though. But it feels worse all the time.

in an old apartment i purposely didn't have wifi, just a desktop with a make-shift standing desk--all designed to minimize the time i spent on the internet. i would often end up laying on the couch staring at my phone instead.

for people like myself who have trouble distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information (and this was a severe handicap for me as a scholar, i'd spend months researching things with only the most tenuous relationship to my own writing "just in case") the internet is an incredible mechanism for capturing attention. that "always on" quality tends to give it prominence over any other other media--the internet is happening now in a way that other mediums cannot match. this makes the information there seem more important to us even when it isn't.

not even live television can match the information stream of twitter. i sometimes read twitter during live sports and i honestly think i barely watch the game sometimes for all the commentary im reading on it. (or think about how getting a text when doing something else almost automatically gives that text message prominence over whatever it was you were doing before, even socializing with a live person!)

the only possible way to react to this situation--other than through sheer will power and self-denial--is to somehow achieve a relationship to the internet in which the informational content doesn't somehow automatically achieve that prominence. how do you push the internet--which automatically tends to foreground itself--into a background which can then be the object of selective attention?

I'm able to do my job on almost complete autopilot these days, it's great. Except it's not great and I hate it. But it allows me to post here constantly without compromising my work one iota, so everybody wins. Except I'm totally not winning. Help me.

Ryan otm

uh some people obviously need to consult a doctor in this thread

have read addiction is really a mental illness but ill leave that to the experts to diagnose

anyway wrt the web

had it since the early 90s

back then 'noise' wasn't pushed in front of you
you had to find it but it was definitely there
and there was a lot of it

there are plugins that will kick you out of a site
or block you from it after an amount of time that you set to your liking

if you feel the web is interfering from your daily life
practise some self discipline

Around 2008 I got rid of my pc and home internet connection, went through university without, sometimes borrowing a computer for writing assignments, mostly using the ones at the uni library. I did it because I couldn't control time spent online and felt much of my browsing was a waste of time. Not having a pc (or smartphone) never stopped me from using the net though, it was always available at the libraries, used it a lot since I ran a music blog, later got a full time job as tech supporter which is when I discovered ilx.

It did cause some hassle to not have pc/internet - no music streaming, warez - but I also found it rewarding.

Gave in last year when I bought a laptop and now have high speed fiber connection, considering getting a smartphone too. It's been less of a change than I'd expected but I've had to install leechlock - perhaps recommended itt? - in browser to help me stay productive/focused when working on digital projects (writing and music).

Ilx makes up abt 99% of my browsing.

there are plugins that will kick you out of a site
or block you from it after an amount of time that you set to your liking

Used one of these last year. I liked it a lot, but ultimately just overrode the controls and unblocked everything. I'll try setting it up again, or looking for another one.

if you feel something is interfering from your daily life, why not practise some self discipline?

Congratulations, you just solved addiction. Your Nobel Prize is in the mail.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but, if there's a steady stream of good writing on the internet, I think I want that? What are y'all reading on the internet? Used to follow thefeature.net, but updates seem few and far between lately...

Also, I am 31, and while I certainly didn't feel blindsided when I found it at age 12 or so (quite the opposite) I do believe that certainly I was, and we all still presently are, absolutely boondoggled by this unbelievable high tech space age Jetsons level jump in communications technology, the ramifications of which we will continue to process for many years to come

point is if its so unimportant you seek advice from nondoctors you should just handle it yourself

if youre taking it serious get out of this board and talk to a doctor

xxp

Treeship- I haven't watched it but here's a video about quitting the internet for a while
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trVzyG4zFMU

I really miss my life before the internet became a daily thing. It became a daily thing because I needed to find a job and then needed to wash away the hideous taste of jobsearching, and internet browsing became an addictive way to do that.

as a person who likes sensation and gets bored easily i feel like my internet habit is fine, maybe even a good thing, given that the rest of my life is and always has been fucking turgid and every other addiction i've flirted with and repudiated is way more actively harmful.

xxp oh cool just what we need itt the internet addiction police

its not policing

treeship posted he shouldnt always crave stimulation and posts in the internet addiction thread

sounds mild to me but i dont know the details

so im saying if its that serious he shd seek professional help instead of talking about it on a board that is mostly used for pub banter/trolling

yes, because the only appropriate place to ever talk about your personal problems is with a fully credentialed professional!

god we have threads here where people talk about wanting to kill themselves, go complain to them if it matters that much to you.

lol

xp interest video robert, thanks.

∞, the reason i posted about this here is because i thought this might be an issue of wide interest/relevance. also smart people post here and i value their insights. therapists i've seen in the past have had good advice for some things but not for this -- i kind of think my generation's relationship to technology is unique. it's not like other compulsions bc "the internet" isn't something that's walled off from everything else, that you can isolate and "quit" like drinking or even compulsive television watching.

today treeship tries to confront his excessive internet usage by thinking about excessive interent usage, what excessive internet usage might mean, what—if anything—'internet addiction' might mean, and how this is imbricated in a constellation of complex sociocultural and historical processes, via the medium of an internet forum where he is a valued and prolific poster

it's how i deal with everything tbh

so im saying if its that serious he shd seek professional help instead of talking about it on a board that is mostly used for pub banter/trolling

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Thursday, June 23, 2016 2:08 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude you do know there are a range of problems that impact lives that don't necessitate going to a doctor?

anyways i think procrastination is a bigger problem for me than the internet itself, the internet just makes procrastinating even easier

not really sure i think it's an "addiction," compulsive behavior sure but i don't think anything we have difficulty maintaining self-control over is necessarily an addiction

and lol i guess i said the exact same thing 3 years ago

not to be a pendant but really the term "addiction" is bogus for the internet. compulsivity yes definitely but not addiction.

― marcos, Monday, July 1, 2013 11:42 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have to say too that it's bogus to say "digital natives" (whatever you think of palfrey's term lol) don't have as big of a problem with compulsive internet use than those of us who experienced it's explosion at an older age

i think it can be an addiction. probably quite closely related to how gambling addiction works.

^^

if you feel something is interfering from your daily life, why not practise some self discipline?

― ogmor, Thursday, June 23, 2016 2:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mind is rly roaming trying to get to grips w what wd motivate anyone to post this in this thread - so richly unhelpful - it is otherwise so interesting + edifying to read everyone talk abt internet colliding w just basic routines of domestication itt. there is this great pt in zadie smith's conversation w chris ware at nypl where she says-

I went to dinner at Jeff Eugenides’s recently with my husband and there was a poet there, a great poet, Michael Dickman, and we were talking, having a perfectly nice dinner and then somehow accidentally, I don’t think he meant it, in the middle, he mentioned the fact that he does not have the Internet, and he got the kind of look, you know how when people used to tell you don’t have television, you’d be like, “Oh, fuck off!” (laughter) so annoying, but he didn’t mean it as a boast or anything, it was just the truth. But as we all went home to our separate lives, I could see everyone was preoccupied with, “Wow, what an extraordinary thing, not to have Internet,” and he was explaining to us, “Well, it’s not that big a deal, when I go to work, I have e-mail, and when I go home, I don’t,” and we’re like, “aaaaah, I see,” (laughter) “so I just wait the night and I answer in the morning.” “Really?” (laughter) It seemed extraordinary. I saw that as perhaps a vision of the future for people who are serious about writing that maybe you could just do without e-mailing someone at two in the morning. Maybe you could just live, do your Internet at work and have your home a space where you don’t do that.

i don't think i have as much of a binary around boredom so much as just participation. one of the things that makes the internet magnetic is its status as a terminal for the ten other things that at other times you might feasibly have been doing elsewhere; if i don't spend a couple hours at night tending to my life on the internet then i am behind - i haven't e-mailed anyone, i haven't let my friend know abt meeting up, i haven't applied for a job, i haven't posted the thing i meant to post - & then as well as this, sometimes it really very credibly is the terminal just for Reading: i'm reading the newspaper when i'm reading the internet, or having looked up words or read wikipedia articles is the foundation of my day-to-day thought. it is more that specific nowness ryan talks abt that is difficult; especially when there is news - the kind of terrible days of paris or similar - you are actively involved in what used to be delivered to you w/no time component as news in real-time, w/only anxiety & lost time to show for what you gained reading abt something unfolding instead of something summized post-fact. i can't untangle myself because for all the F5ing my e-mail i'm also very engaged & kind of alive & participatory & connected to the world when i am reading or writing someone, here; it's just that it's hard to be economical abt that & reenter yr physical body after merging brain w/screen. i know that the poet mentioned above's neat home/work split opens up the sub-problem of inviting internet too messily into what's meant to be productive time (& that there are other punctures in a no-internet-at-home arrangement, cf internet-via-phone, cf waiting for the passing train to trail Free AmTrak Wi-Fi past yr phone for long enough to let it at least periodically do its check-ups), but it seems like as good a system as any other right now.

if you feel the web is interfering from your daily life
practise some self discipline
― F♯ A♯ (∞), Thursday, 23 June 2016 15:47 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

excuse me !, pls redirect my bile accordingly

Great post schlump!

Been trying to restrict internet usage to 4 days a week, with the hope of eventually getting it down to 3 days a week. It's not going well but it is really satisfying when I manage a day without the internet, it feels like the good old days.

This might be a plan

Impressive. Does that include smartphone use?

I'm always content when I can manage one day a week without the internet (usually Sundays). It does feel very good.

When you are looking at the internet is that with phone, tablet or computer

I never use internet on phone, that alone seems a big part of any battle won. I use the computer all day for work so I'm a heavy internet user but don't feel addicted

I've just started using Spaces on Mac, and wish I had before. Now I have multiple desktop spaces split out eg

1) terminal, 2) vscode, 3) work browser, 4) twitter, 5) slack/skype, 6) non-work browser, 7) mail, etc. Thinking could add a pomodoro or time/alarm to each desktop, eg non-work browser has say 20 mins as soon as you go there.

I have an ipad and plan was to use that more for reading but ive lost the charging cable and havent got round to getting another

If you have issues with internet addiction i think focusing on the means rather than the source is better, try taking the phone out of the equation, that kills off a lot of the autopilot use