Is Net addiction for real?
What types of compulsive Internet behaviors are there?
How can I tell whether I've got a problem with Internet use?
Where can I find out more?

You know you're addicted to the Internet when...

• You kiss your girlfriend's home page.
• Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
• Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.
• You find yourself brainstorming for new subjects to search.
• You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone lines.
• You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a cellular modem and a laptop.
• You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap...and your child in the overhead compartment.
• All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to the net: 28.8...ISDN...cable modem...T1...T3.
• And even your night dreams are in HTML.
• You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a word processor.com.

(From 50 signs that you're addicted to the Internet)

Any of us who have spent time online -- whether surfing the web, visiting in chat rooms or debating in Usenet forums -- can probably relate to some of those one-liners. We often joke about our Internet usage. But for many people, the notion of Internet addiction is no laughing matter.

Internet addiction: Is it for real?

Since the 1998 release of Caught in the Net, psychiatrist Kimberly S. Young's controversial book about Internet addiction, psychiatrists, psychologists, academicians, sociologists, journalists and the Internet population in general have been debating the subject. Actually, the topic of Internet addiction was nothing new to cybernauts, who had been discussing the possibilities of such a compulsion since the Net's earliest days. But Young's book brought new attention to the theory that people could become hooked on the Net.

Before Young's book, most people thought the only people in danger of Internet addiction -- if, indeed, such a thing existed -- were the geeks. But as the Internet becomes more ubiquitous in our wired world, we see that compulsive Internet use is not limited to the coders and the programmers. For example:

A 36-year-old female attorney who played an online role-playing game called Darkness Falls developed a surreal relationship with a male character she met while playing the game. The man "became my fantasy on-line husband," she says. "I began to spend more and more time online playing the game. I felt as though I had fallen in love with this character." The two began exchanging e-mail messages, then phone calls. "I started spending less and less time with my husband and more time being online." She soon started missing court appearances because of her addiction to the game and her fantasy spouse. "Luckily for me, my online husband after a year and a half dumped me. My God, it was the worst feeling in the world. I felt like I had lost everything in the world that mattered to me. I left the game because I hurt so much."

A thriving Southern Baptist church in Georgia was torn asunder by the seductive new technology of the Internet. A church deacon’s wife of nineteen years left him and their two children for a man she’d met in a chat room for Christians. Another deacon’s eighteen-year marriage ended after his wife met a European man in a chat room, and a Sunday school teacher in that same congregation had to be removed from his teaching duties after developing an interest in online pornography.

A young investor named Adam got caught up in trading stocks online during the heady days of the Internet’s hypergrowth. Married in 1999, he put his young marriage at risk to feed his online investing habit. It "took me just three weeks to dip into our wedding money and blow it in the stock market," he says. His wife eventually kicked him out after a police officer showed up at their house because of bad checks he’d been writing.

An administrative assistant in a busy real estate office logged on to one of the many cyberspace singles spots from her office. She met a man online and began exchanging love letters with him throughout the workday. Her boss caught on, cut off her Internet access and gave her an official reprimand. Undeterred, the woman convinced a co-worker to let her borrow her Internet account. "When my boss found out, he fired me on the spot."

In each of the above true-life examples, seemingly normal individuals succumbed to the seductive power of the Internet. How did these people -- attorneys, church leaders, office workers, investors -- end up allowing their lives to become controlled by the Internet? What hath this technology wrought?

Psychiatrists like Young, David N. Greenfield and others believe these people are among the victims of a psychological disorder they call Internet addiction. According to a 1999 study by Greenfield and ABC News, approximately 11 million Americans have the Internet habit. Today, with more of the U.S. population plugged into the Internet than when Greenfield’s study was conducted, and with global Internet usage expanding rapidly, the number of so-called Internet addicts could be even higher.

Whether you believe, like Young and Greenfield, that Internet addiction is a true disorder, or whether you think that all this talk of Internet addiction is blown out of proportion, you probably would agree that there is a problem with "web surfeiting" in our culture today. For all of its promise as a technology that can improve communication, workplace productivity, commerce and community, the Internet is also a cause for alarm as more Internet users surf the Web to access pornography, engage in cybersex, lose themselves in virtual game worlds, load their credit cards with online purchases, or simply sit entranced, pointing and clicking their way through the never-ending labyrinth of Web sites.

As a tool, the Internet can be a useful thing. Even Greenfield and Young agree with that assessment. "I recognize and applaud its many benefits in searching for information, keeping up with the latest news, and communicating with others rapidly and effectively," Young says. "Indeed, when I need to begin a new research project, the Internet is often my first stop." Unabashedly, Greenfield proclaims his affection for the technology. "I love the Internet," he says. "I think it is one of the greatest frontiers in our modern world." He adds, "I do not see it as an inherently destructive force, but rather as a powerful medium that needs to be understood and respected."

Perhaps we can agree, then, that the Internet is not inherently evil. Perhaps we can even pronounce it as a useful resource in our culture. But is it possible that some of us are getting too much of a good thing?

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• Online gaming. Computer games are big business -- bigger than Hollywood. People spend more of their entertainment dollars on gaming than on going to the movies. And with the growth of online games -- from popular role-playing games (RPGs) like EverQuest and Ultima Online to interactive versions of traditional board games like checkers and backgammon -- more and more people are logging on to play.
• Cybersex and online porn. We've all heard and read about the pervasiveness of Internet pornography and "cybersex" in Internet chat rooms. What many people don't realize, however, is that Internet porn is big business. Porn sites make up the largest segment of e-commerce sales.
• Shopping, trading and auctioning. Buying and selling online is growing in popularity, and as a result we're seeing more people suffering from problems related to buying and selling stocks, shopping for goods online, and even trading over eBay and other auction sites.
• Music. Napster may be dead, but the practice of swapping and downloading digital music files lives on. Consider the case of Gregg, a "textbook Napster addict" who "has 1,389 music files on his hard drive" and "downloads 20 to 30 clips a day, and once spent four hours searching for one song."

Each of these categories has its own specific problems and concerns. The cybersex "addict" goes online for different reasons than the eBay junkie. But both share some common traits as well.

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• Psychiatrist Kimberly Young's Internet addiction test is one of the most comprehensive assessments available online. Young is the author of Caught in the Net. Her site offers additional quizzes pertaining to cybersex, online trading and auctioning, and more. Click here to access those surveys.
• Another fairly comprehensive quiz is this Internet addiction test from Internet behavior consultant Richard A. Davis of InternetAddiction.ca
• Another comprehensive, 20-question survey.

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• Hooked on the Net, by Andrew Careaga
• Caught in the Net, by Kimberly S. Young
• Virtual Addiction, by David N. Greenfield
• Real Solutions for Overcoming Internet Addictions, by Stephen O. Watters
• In the Shadows of the Net, Patrick Carnes, editor
• Cybersex Exposed, by Jennifer Schneider
• Tangled in the Web, by Kimberly S. Young

• Center for Online Addiction, Kimberly S. Young's website, provides links to online tests, articles and other resources related to her research
• The Center for Internet Studies is the Web site of David N. Greenfield and features articles by Greenfield, a Net addiction assessment, and the results of the 1999 Internet addiction study Greenfield conducted with ABC News.
• Computer and Cyberspace Addiction, part of John Suler’s hypertext book The Psychology of Cyberspace. Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University, has links to numerous articles and other sites related to Internet addiction.
• InternetAddiction.ca, the site of Richard A. Davis, an Internet addiction consultant. This site includes several of Davis' articles on the topic and links to other resources.
• Is the Internet Addictive? Or Are Addicts Using the Internet? An interesting article by Storm A. King from 1996.
• The Throes of Addiction, an essay by self-described Net addict Alan Sondheim
• PsychCentral's Internet Addiction Guide

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