“[A couple years ago], 51-year-old Craig Smallwood, an online gamer, was given leave by a court in Hawaii to proceed with a lawsuit against NC Interactive, complaining that he received insufficient warnings regarding the alleged ‘addictiveness’ of its online game Lineage II, which he claims to have spent 20,000 hours playing since 2004,” a bummer state-of-the-world bit of info courtesy of New Scientist in an article titled “CrackBerries and games addicts: Beware an internet hit.”So, internet addiction. Is it a symptom of the impending singularity? Not a bad thing at all, but a hopeful sign that we are becoming integrated, taking that giant leap into post-human, post-carbon based evolution. Is it a bona fide medical condition like depression or even alcoholism? Or are we talking about chubby lonely males trying to shirk responsibility while debasing actual dangerous physical addictions?Another quote from the piece: “It reported that, through multitasking, the average Briton is managing to cram 8 hours, 48 minutes of daily screen-based media consumption into just 7 hours. And it’s much higher for people aged 16 to 24 years: they manage to shoehorn 9.5 hours of media into just 6.5 hours a day.”I’m not entirely sure what makes all of this that much different than channel surfing, which back in the early ‘90s was another source of “addiction” freak out. Or for that matter, the “old” kind of video games that aren’t online or requiring of super-advanced computer processors. So, what does make this different? Not sure exactly. When media-obsessive behavior skips around different kinds of media, it’s more difficult to trace. Not to say that the kind of interactivity we have these days isn’t off the charts compared to TV and earlier generation video games, but it’s hard to imagine that those areas of the brain getting tickled by the internet are all that different than those getting tickled by TV.So, maybe this is you: an internet addict. Flipping around windows like you’re shuffling cards—you remember cards, right?—neck-deep in WoW, living an entirely vegetable-free existence, and sleeping only during the occasional reboot. We can help! Or we can at least poke fun under the guise of helping.1) Magic the GatheringPlay Magic, with people. You can do this like all of the time, and keeping up a killer deck can take the same kind of devotion as doing whatever it is you do in Second Life.2) Learning to actually make something.Like, with your hands.3) The messageboard chalkboardJust set up a big chalkboard or dry-erase board in a warehouse somewhere. You could actually see the people you’re posting with and, maybe just maybe, you may find that you like talking to them.4) Switching to dial-upLoading. . . loading. . . loading. . . sunshine.5) Heroin6) Go AmishTrading Cheetos for cheese curds, amirite.7) Spend your time handwriting letters condemning network neutralityNetwork neutrality is what enables you to not have to worry about your internet provider choking your service on a whim.8) Realize that other people in the world have actual real problemsWar with real guns, for example.9) Move to TurkmenistanFrom the Committee To Protect Journalists:President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov promised to open his isolated country to the world by providing public Internet access. But when the country's first Internet café opened in 2007, it was guarded by soldiers, connections were uneven, the hourly fee was prohibitively high, and authorities monitored or blocked access to certain sites. The Russian telecommunications company MTS, which entered the Turkmen market in 2005, started offering Web access from mobile phones in June 2008, but service agreements require customers to avoid Web sites critical of the Turkmen government.10) Give upSeriously, this isn’t going to kill you. Living a totally sedentary life may, but you’re not going to OD or anything.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv, @everydayelk.A version of this post originally appeared Sept. 15, 2010.
Advertisement
Advertisement