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Touching and eye-opening essay in Newsweek on net addiction. - The Diigo Meta page

www.newsweek.com/216911 - Cached

This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 09 Oct 2009, by Andrew Nachison.

  • 11 Dec 09
    kgutierrezdiigo
    KatherineG EWSIS
    • It was also revealing. I hadn't checked my e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter accounts for nearly 14 hours by the time I showed up at the wooded five-acre retreat, situated with some irony less than 15 miles from Microsoft Corp.'s Redmond headquarters. That drought had begun to eat away at me enough that by the time I walked through the door I was so fixated on plugging back in that my brain was able to push past the blatant insensitivity it took to ask such a question.
      • KatherineG EWSIS

        KatherineG EWSIS on 2009-12-11

        internet addiction is sever and it's like a drug. You get so used to it that you need it. And if you go a long time with out it you begin to try and find ways to use what they believe they need.

    • Andrew, who is four years older than I am, sleeps in a roomy tent, atop three mattresses he's acquired from one place or another, between a set of railroad tracks and Oregon State Highway 99, in a clearing ringed by blackberry bushes. He lives most days the same way. He gets up when he feels like it, walks to the local Grocery Outlet, and uses food stamps to buy a microwaveable meal. Then he treks over to the local soup kitchen and enjoys a free lunch, answering the greetings of his other homeless pals, who speak to me highly of the obese, bearded man they call "Ace."
    • 1 more annotations...
  • 13 Oct 09
    jmmermet
    Jean-Michel Mermet

    internet addiction

  • 09 Oct 09
    anachison
    Andrew Nachison

    The Internet is addicting, says psychologist David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Conn., because it works on a "variable ratio reinforcement schedule," which is a fancy way of saying that it gets you high every once in awhile. This is based on a theory first espoused by renowned psychologist B. F. Skinner—not knowing whether a reward is coming is actually more compelling than being able to count on results every time.

    "It can be as simple as finding an e-mail you like, hearing from somebody you love, being told a cousin is coming to visit, interspersed among a lot of neutral, less-salient information," Greenfield says. "You don't know how desirable that will be or when you're going to get it."