Compulsive computer use

Can’t kick the IT habit? It’s time to stop worrying and state the case for free will.

I learnt a new acronym this week: CCU. Minding my own business one morning in a hotel room in Virginia, in the US, I find, on nationwide television, a heavyweight panel debating war on Iran, Hillary Clinton’s plans for health care, and, with equal force, Compulsive Computer Use.

From the revered American Medical Association (AMA), president Ron Davis insists that CCU means you can get in trouble with ‘your family, your community, your cohort’ – so ‘you forget about the real life because you’re so busy working or playing in the virtual world’. Then veteran talk show host John McLaughlin goes further: while many Americans ‘obsess’ over computer gambling and games, he insists, many are also ‘addicted to instant messaging, text messaging, e-mail. As a result, health is ignored. Marriages crumble. Families disintegrate. Jobs are lost’.

That’s the first time I’ve heard IT fingered for job losses not through its automation of labour processes, but rather through the addiction it supposedly incites. But it seems I’m behind the times. Though the Recognizing Addiction as a Disease Act 2007, a new legislative measure from the US Congress, only deals with drug abuse, McLaughlin asks: why not include computer addiction as well? Symptoms, he adds, include inability to limit time spent on a computer, lying about that time spent, and isolation – both social and mental.

Thankfully, commentators from Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune demur, daringly contending that it’s fine for airlines, for example, to direct people to websites to buy their tickets. Also, the American Medical Association itself has backed off from classifying computer games as addictive, preferring to talk about Internet and video game ‘overuse’. (1)

Yet I don’t believe we can relax in our ridiculing of those who fret about IT addicts. After all, the human race is supposed to be addicted to oil (George Bush, no less), sex, gambling, over-eating, alcohol, shopping and consumer goods in general. The one addiction people never question, however, is that of ‘experts’ to the ubiquitous metaphor of… addiction.

Arguments in defence of computer gaming – that it’s good for quick reactions, concentration, hand-eye coordination, and for meeting fellow gamers – seem to me weak and defensive. Moreover at least one UK employer has recently gone on record as saying that Facebook is more addictive than crack cocaine – and that several members of his staff were in ‘desperate need’ of a 12-step programme. (2)

We’ve not heard the last of CCU. The reason: in our misanthropic age, the real and popular target of criticism is not computers, but their users. Instead of upholding how autonomous adults have, through free will, given the world the wonderful tool of IT, we’re force-fed a nightmare in which a nation of saps inevitably falls victim to an anorak version of cheap thrills. It’s human nature, innit?

Well, no. That view is much more disempowering than any long spell at a keyboard.

References

(1) http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/17694.html

(2) http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39168320,00.htm