Is Internet a harmful drug?

Is Internet a harmful drug? (on 16th Nov, 2000 by Sandy Lo)

How many times does it happen that you tell yourself that you just spend a little bit of your time checking email but you end up surfing the net for a few hours (or even more) and feel very guilty? (Because instead of doing your studies or work you've spent time chatting with your friends about trivia or looking for information unrelated to your work or websites just for fun!)

Internet is regarded as one of the greatest inventions in the world of the 20th Century. It has lots of advantages, which every one of us can tell immediately. It helps a lot in the search for information with a very large database. You can find a piece of information about a foreign movie whenever you like on the net instead of spending a great deal of time travelling to the library and ending up finding nothing (frustrating, huh?), especially in such information explosion days. You can keep yourself updated about what is going on in the world, about a shop, a product, language learning, local & world news. No wonder most of the companies, small or large, have their homepages to promote themselves. Even a lot of people have their individual homepages.(just like mine, where you can get to know more about me and read this article now)

You can keep in touch with your family, your friends, your beloved ones or someone with whom you have lost contact for long via email or icq and this saves you time and money. You can send them a card in thirty seconds and you can even make new friends from a place which you've never heard of or which you haven't been to before, using English, an international language, or technically lingua franca, for communication.

You can sned an online application form for a job, practise your English via online exercises or by chatting with another person for free (it'd be interesting to study the language used for chatting - with a great deal of code-mixing, for example - and the effectiveness of language improvement in this way. It'd be also worth studying the creation of new words used on the internet. You can play games, take courses, "see" what's going on in the street, learn something new, win a prize, get vouchers and discounts, apply for anything, be a multi-billionnaire by making a business out of it. Internet has created a virtual reality. There are lots and lots of advantages of the Internet and I think you can write a thesis of hundred thousands of words about this topic.

However, while you're enjoying your surfing and a chat with your friends on the net, have you been alert on the dangers of the use of Internet? Many people, especially the educationalists and those who study the effects of Internet, do be aware of the harms it brings about. For educationalists like teachers, they are often concerned about the content of the webpages our youths read - whether it's full of violence and pornography. Also, more and more reports have been released about the fact that people are getting addicted to the Internet. Addiction to the Internet is considered a kind of disease with symptoms like isolation and inability to control oneself in the use of the Internet. (Have you ever doubted that you've got similar symptoms?) Some people can't stop separating themselves from it. Internet has become a necessity like air and water for them. (Sometimes I wonder if people would isolate themselves from the others. Compare the virtual reality with the real world where you have real contact with people)

Consider the following situations, which you may find familiar with. When you are on the net, sometimes you may find your get lost and you don't know where to start your information search. So, you click onto a search engine like yahoo and you are given a lot of websites for reference. Then you go to each one of them, if you are patient and have plenty of time. It takes you up to a few hours. Or, you go into a website which you frequently visit, when you are bored. You find something interesting and so you go reading it and find more related websites. So, it will be another few hours. You are checking your email and a friend of yours initiates a conversation with you on ICQ, which I think is one of the major causes for internet addiction. So both of you start chatting on any subject. Later, a few of your friends may also send you messages. Then you are busy the whole night chatting with each one of them.

I always think everything has two coins. Internet has its advantages and disadvantages and I believe few people would deny its advantages (or maybe people are forced to agree since Internet has become part of our life). The question is whether you can find a balance between them. That's what Chinese always assert - a middle way. So I am now trying to keep myself a distance from the Internet by not getting my computer connected to the Internet, though I still spend around one to two ours on it in the computer cluster of the university's library every day.

This part was last updated on 16th Nov, 2000.

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