Too Much Internet

Maybe cell phone addiction isn't the only kind of electronic addiction sweeping the world these days. According to one of the rehab center "boot camp" (that's what they call them, not I)  in China, about 14% of China's youths may be addicted to the Internet.  Those places are notorious in China, run like a prison camp and the last place an internet addict would want to go  to break his or her addiction.

As a result, some addicts, their parents or loved ones take action on their own. And that might be even worse than the re hab boot camps. In one case that was reported in China, a teenager known as "Little Wang," made effort to end his addiction, by cutting his left hand off. Ouch! Are you cell addicts ready for a similar course? I'll supply the knives if necessary. Haha There may be peace for me after all.

Little Wang, who is 19 years old called a taxi to take him to the hospital last week, leaving a note telling his mother he'd be back soon. He left the hand behind on the nearby bench where he cut it off, but the hospital was able to reattach it. Sad, is it not? The good news is  that surgeons say that he should  regain  at least some control, but probably not all of it, of his hands.

"We cannot accept what has happened. It was completely out of the blue. He was a smart boy," says his mother. What does smart have to do with addiction?  Addicts, whether it be electronic ones or any type, are more victims of personality type than intelligence. It's why a parent should be very observant when a child who uses a cell phone, or anything else with an internet connection more than he or she should. At that point it is time to pull the plugs and show the child the joys of living in real world.

News reports of Little Wang's cutting dead quote one of his teachers as saying Little Wang's Internet habit made him "impetuous." China is one of several countries grappling with an addiction "epidemic", probably because in those countries escape from a sometimes dreary or hard reality is attempted by entering too often into the virtual world.   Taiwan, another place where electronic addiction has become routine, has established fining systems for parents who let their kids spend too much time on their computers. And Japan, like China, has addiction re hab camps.

China now has about 250 of them.  The government there sees such addiction as a clinical disorder that's among the top dangers to young people, though there may be a political side to that,  given that the government is concerned about people organizing online to make life difficult for maintaining the government's control over the every day lives of its people. 

And in Japan there has surfaced a mysterious psychological phenomenon in which young people are so immersed into their cell phones and internet world that they are unable to even leave their houses. I wonder if this reflects an approaching tipping point in the use of those gadgets. Perhaps the world is starting to see that reality is more fulfilling than the entertainment value that the virtual world gives us.