Internet addiction and mental illness

The free London paper ran a front page article today on the relationship between Internet addiction and mental illness, as researched by Dr Catriona Morrison.

If people are addicted, it can affect a person’s ability to perform at work or they may be failing to do chores so they can go online.’

However, she admitted more work needed to be done to establish whether addiction or mental illness comes first.

We all know that it is possible to become addicted to things that are otherwise pretty harmless, even healthy. But once things have reached addiction levels, it is a different matter entirely. I once saw a man selling his own children's toys on the pavement in order to get money for the next bottle. In the throes of addiction, people will contravene even their own codes of decency.

The thing is, when you're addicted to something, the only option seems to be a complete break. An alcoholic will never have the control necessary to become an occasional social drinker.

So what hope is there for an Internet addict? Cutting off all usage of the Internet would be akin to a voluntary imposition of illiteracy and near-hermitage.

Is a puzzlement.

Connection speed projections in Sweden

Being a family of Swedes and South Africans living in the UK, we are often afforded an interesting vista of contrasts in terms of life experience in the three countries which impact our lives so greatly. This week is no different.

Here in the UK, there is a big push for improved broadband connection speeds. The goal is 2Mbps for every home by 2012.

Sweden has opted to aim higher. Their Minister for Communications has promised "100Mbps broadband to 90 per cent of its population by 2020, with 40 per cent having it by 2015". It will be interesting to see if they manage it.

Meantime, my South African relatives are still largely on dial up!

LPOD - history of the Internet

Thanks to Clive Shepherd (via Twitter) I came across this today - an animation of the history of the Internet. Much of it was stuff I knew already, but there were several bits and bobs that I didn't know.



Quite nicely done, I thought.

Blocking and unblocking

A few things have happened that have got me thinking about access control. First off, Jeff Utecht reports how he is going to have to unlearn the habit of skipping sites that are blocked in China, now that he is no longer based there.

Then, yesterday, as I was travelling by train, I got into a conversation with two total strangers. One of them had a daughter who had been studying Islam in religious education at primary school this term past. The kids were making a collage of images to represent the faith, so they all hit Google Images (no warnings about the unauthorised use of copyright material, evidently). On the very first page was the image of a woman being beheaded and a child having his arm driven over by a truck. The kids were traumatised. The teacher was mortified. The parents were incensed.

Apparently, it transpired that the controls are set county wide by the local authorities and someone had reduced the security levels on the netminding software. This sounds very fishy to me, and I wonder if the truth is (a) that no-one at the school knew how to operate the netminder software, and had assumed it was handled elsewhere or (b) that one of the older kids in the school had figured out how to reset things in order to gain access to stuff that was off-limits.

The reaction was that the school immediately shut down all access to the internet. Sledgehammer. Nut.

The third incident also happened yesterday. For the period of the school holidays, we have subscribed to a television service that provides sport coverage and movies for our boys to watch while if they fancy doing so while we're at work. If they try to watch a movie with a certificate of 12 or above, the system asks for a pin number. We're actually quite happy for our kids to watch movies with a 15 certificate, so we looked for a way to increase this age limit.

There isn't one.

So we phoned the service provider and asked how it can be done. Apparently, the only option available to us is to give them the pin number, which automatically also empowers them to buy stuff off the selly telly channels and to watch movies of any sort at all, including hard porn, should it happen to be included in the provision of the service. Obviously the underlying assumption is that there will always be an adult present to enter the pin code. When kids are in their teens, this is increasingly unlikely. When my husband pointed this out to the woman who was assisting him, she said "Ooh. I hadn't thought of that." It transpired that she had given her own son her pin number so that he could watch movies while she was at work, and it hadn't occurred to her that he might be watching all sorts of unsuitable material.

I am not in favour of abdicating our responsibility as adults in respect of the children in our house may or may not see. But I need more control myself over the settings available to me. I don't want to have to go the route of the blanket ban, but it seems there are few alternatives in some cases.

Karyn unplugged

Nineteen days after moving into our new house, we are still without connection to the Internet. Put like that, it doesn't sound like much of an issue, but let's just break it down, for a moment.

Bearing in mind that there are four people in our house, two adults (one of each gender) and two schoolgoing teenagers, this means (in no particular order) nineteen days without :

• private email accounts
• Facebook, MySpace and all that that implies (no Scrabulous... gasp!)
  
• ball by ball reports on the cricket going on down in New Zealand... or any other sport, for that matter
  
• working from home and, with a 21 mile drive each way and diesel at £1.13/litre (that's £4.97 or $9.95 per gallon, folks), believe me when I say I'd like to be able to do that at least twice a week!
• the freedom to check what the £:$ conversion rate is at the drop of a hat
• access to resources for homework
• instant messaging
• free international calls via Skype
• any progress on my dissertation (which is being delivered online)
• being able to search for a good recipe for bobotie for my dinner guests
• a single glimpse of new photos of my grandnephew

I'm sure I'll think of other things, but that list flowed without a pause! I feel as if I've been exiled. I can't understand how it can take so long to arrange. The router arrived within days, and my husband dully installed it. Someone, somewhere just needs to flip a switch, or click a mouse or something.

Some of the things on the list I can occasionally do from the office (such as my personal emails), but it doesn't do to abuse these things, or they will go the way of Facebook and be blocked. My husband (as a CIO) can do wahtever he pleases online, so he's alright, thanks awfully. But our sons don't have that luxury.

They are feeling thoroughly deprived. They are also worried about losing contact with their friends. This has been an interesting insight. All things being equal, they communicate with their friends far more often than I ever have with mine, but their relationships are less robust and apparently may be adversely affected by an absence of several weeks. I'm trust this isn't true of all their friendships. I genuinely hope that they each have at least one friend with whom they can pick up the threads after long absences.

In a week's time, I am going on holiday to South Africa, where I will meet up again with my best friend, who is possibly the biggest luddite and worst correspondent on the planet. I haven't seen her - and have hardly heard from her - since she threw me a surprise party for my 40th birthday (which was several years ago during my last visit to Cape Town!), but I am (fairly) confident that it will be as if we were never apart.

That's an unplugged relationship destined never to go online. Right now, I have cause to be very grateful for the unplugged things in my life! I'd go nuts without them.