One young person’s strategy for so-called Net addiction is FreeFace.com. He commented in a New York Times blog asking students for their strategies that, as a part-time student [who] “found myself drifting sometimes, usually to news websites or Facebook,” he started using this time management software that restricts access to sites and programs during time periods the user sets for him or herself. The Times blog pointed to a study published in “>Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine which found that 1,041 teens in Guangzhou Province who use the Net excessively are about 2.5 times more likely to develop depression. “Ninety-four percent of students surveyed were classified as normal Internet users and 6% as moderately pathological or at severe risk for addiction. After nine months, 87 students, or 8.4%, developed mild to severe depression,” reported the Times in a separate article. According to Australian youth worker Chris Hudson, the researchers have “yet to determine whether or not the teens who became depressed were at risk of depression before they became addicted to the Internet.” “What we’re not seeing in the research is this statement of Hudson’s: “One factor to the link between overuse of the Internet and psychological problems like depression may be that the Internet is actually isolating and alienating.” Maybe on Web 1.0, when users were interacting mainly with Web sites, but not on the social Web, which is grounded in their real-life social networks (see “How social networks can be protective” and “The social Web Petri dish”).
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