The Washington Post published a fascinating piece this week about the severe measures China is taking to combat Internet addiction among its youth. Parents send their kids to so-called treatment facilities that actually look like a cross between a prison and a mental institution, complete with bars on the windows, padlocks on the doors and, for the hardest to treat patients, shock therapy.
Now, it's certainly easy to laugh at this news as another example of China's extremism. But who doesn't secretly wonder about our growing dependence on the Internet for a constant flow of information, messages and entertainment? How many of us have doubled the time we spent online in recent years without really noticing?
Just last week, Reuters published a story about an executive coach in Pennsylvania who devised a 12-step program for e-mail addiction.
So, there seems to be some universal agreement on the addictive nature of the Internet, the only differences being whether to treat the problem with cognitive therapy or tough love.
The head of the Chinese clinic featured in The Washington Post is a military researcher who built his career treating heroin addicts. The story also notes that few countries have been as effective in fighting drug and alcohol addictions as China.
But what harm can really be done by spending too much time in front of the Internet, besides, say, weight gain from lack of exercise or the piling up of other chores that never get attended to?
Chinese authorities, who treat a range of children from those who spend only a few hours a week online to those who stay up all night playing games, speak of lost interest in school, lost social skills, lost souls and even lost lives. In one high-profile case, an online gamer was murdered in a dispute over some virtual property, and a string of suicides have also been linked to obsessive Internet use.—Andrea Orr
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