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DOI: 10.1145/1592761.1592767
David Roman
internet addiction:
it’s spreading, but is it Real?
Communications’ news stories cover a lot of ground and sometimes raise a provocative question. A recent case in point: “Is Internet Addiction Real?” I was sure the
answer to this question was ‘no’ after reading a story posted on the site that told
of a 15-year-old boy who was beaten to death at an Internet addiction treatment
center in China ( http://cacm.acm.org/news/41829) that sounded more like a re-education camp. That impression wasn’t lessened by the Chinese government’s
estimate that 10% of its Internet users under the age of 18 are addicts.
But I wavered when I learned that Internet addiction centers are growing outside China as well, in South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. We published a story
about ReSTART, an Internet detox center located a laser shot from Microsoft’s
headquarters ( http://cacm.acm.org/news/42675). It treats behaviors worthy of a
intRoDucinG acm’s
muLtimeDia centeR
are you interested in watching a
short video about social robots
using Facebook? What about an
instructional video on the uses
of PenLight, which combines a
mobile projector and a digital
pen to create a dynamic visual
overlay? how about a 23-minute
discourse on articulated mesh
animation from multiview
silhouettes? These videos and
others are currently available
from aCM’s Multimedia Center,
http://multimedia.myacm.org/,
which is offering free access to
a collection of videos about a
multitude of areas of computing.
The aCM Multimedia Center
will feature a total of 10 videos,
with a new video replacing an
existing one each week. The
current selection of videos
range in length from nearly two
minutes (video-based emergent
storytelling) to an hour and two
minutes (Frances e. allen’s 2006
a. M. Turing award lecture),
with most videos ranging in
length from a few minutes to
20 minutes. Visitors can learn
more about the context of
each video by clicking on the
link to its source in the aCM
digital Library. (access to the
source’s full text requires an
aCM membership and a digital
Library subscription.)
12-step program, such as a monomaniacal desire for online time, an inability to
disconnect, and lying about Web habits. But it’s also true that many overworked
software programmers would fail ReSTART’s survey on Internet addiction (http://
www.netaddiction.com/resources/internet_addiction_test.htm). As a corrective,
neither the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders nor the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases recognize Internet addiction as a disorder, and the Indian Journal
of Psychiatry reports that Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) may have started as a
satirical hoax ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.ni
h.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738353/).
Addictions are destructive. Smoking kills 438,000 people in the U.S. each year,
reports the Centers for Disease Control. And it’s difficult to imagine how the
problems that what IAD brings to individuals, relationships, and families could
ever match alcoholism’s rain of pain.
Addiction? Without stronger evidence, the jury is still out.
sco9
The premier international
conference on high performance
computing, networking, storage,
and analysis, sCo9 will take
place Nov. 14–20 in Portland,
or. sC09’s theme is “Computing
for a Changing World,” and
will also include special focus
discussions on bio-computing,
sustainability, and 3d internet.
The sC09 technical program
will include featured speakers
such as intel senior Fellow and
CTo Justin rattner, who will
deliver an opening address;
Leroy hood, president and
cofounder of the institute for
systems Biology, who is an
invited plenary speaker; and
former u.s. Vice President al
gore who is the conference
keynote speaker.
For more information on
sC09, please visit http://sc09.
supercomputing.org.