Born Digital by Palfrey John & Gasser Urs

Author:Palfrey, John & Gasser, Urs [Palfrey, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780786727704
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Some recent headlines from around the world:• “A South Korean games addict died after playing nonstop for 86 hours.”3

• “An overweight 26-year-old man from north-eastern China has died after a ceaseless gaming session over the Lunar New Year holiday.”4

• “A 30-year-old man has died in the south China province of Guangzhou after apparently playing an online game continuously for three days.”5

Internet addiction is the extreme form of information overload. As with extreme cases of any other type, it gets more than its fair share of attention. Especially in East Asia, there is a growing worry about the effects of the digital information environment on the health and mental well-being of children. Particularly at risk, it appears, are “gamers”—those young people who play a lot of video games and their close cousin, online games. A 2007 poll found that 8.5 percent of youth gamers in the United States could be classified as pathologically addicted to playing video games.6 In an online British study that same year, 12 percent of gamers demonstrated addictive behavior.7 In summer 2006, the first inpatient clinic for computer game addicts in Europe opened its doors;8 Korea, meanwhile, already has more than forty game-addiction counseling agencies registering thousands of cases per year.9 According to government estimates reported in the press in 2006, 2.4 percent of South Koreans aged nine to thirty-nine are addicts, and another 10.2 percent are borderline cases. 10 In June 2007, the American Medical Association (AMA) debated whether video-game overuse should be considered an addiction. The organization ultimately decided not to formally designate it as such; the measure it adopted instead did say, however, that playing too many computer games has become a problem for many people, both children and adults. In a study released in 2006, Stanford University researchers reported that 13.7 percent of the adults they interviewed said they found it difficult to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time. According to the same study, 8.2 percent said they used the Internet as a way to escape problems or relieve negative moods.11

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