"iCrazy" Newsweek Article

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Finally a few studies have been published in medical journals about societies growing addiction to being online. This article sums up these studies well, enjoy .

Is the Internet Making Us Crazy? What the New Research Says - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

We may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently toldScientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.”

Rosen, the author of iDisorder, points to a preponderance of research showing “a link between Internet use, instant messaging, emailing, chatting, and depression among adolescents,” as well as to the “strong relationships between video gaming and depression.” But the problem seems to be quality as well as quantity: bad interpersonal experiences—so common online—can lead to these potential spirals of despair. For her book Alone Together, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle interviewed more than 450 people, most of them in their teens and 20s, about their lives online. And while she’s the author of two prior tech-positive books, and once graced the cover of Wired magazine, she now reveals a sad, stressed-out world of people coated in Dorito dust and locked in a dystopian relationship with their machines.