Exploring Internet Addiction & the Link to Social Networking/Web 2.0
Its an important topic but of course we rarely hear much about it obviously, because it potentially tarnishes the luster of ICT.
From USA Today:
In a suburb of high-tech Seattle, what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors. It opened in July and for $14,000 offers a 45-day program intended to help people wean themselves from pathological computer use, which can include obsessive use of video games, texting, Facebook, eBay, Twitter and any other time-killers brought to you courtesy of technology.
Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-09-03-internet-addiction_N.htm
For me the larger issue is how do we use these tools effectively to build collective human IQ and instill those kind of cultural values so that it becomes a way of enabling more effective global collaboration between communities and networks to address world urgent issues from more of a grassroots perspective rather than a top down centralized model which for most of the history of human civilization has be the norm.
For me the larger issue is how do we use these tools effectively to build Collective Human IQ and instill the kind of cultural values (that reflect the highest human aspiration to do well and serve humanity in the best way possible) within our networks. This we would hope would or could be Augmented (a word Doug Engelbart likes to use and which to some distinguishes him from other approaches to technology such those who gravitate more towards AI or Singularity mindset) by social networking tools like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and the other ones that become hip and cool for us to use as social networkers.
Regardless of how hip we are though (with our mastery of the latest state of the art web 2.0 tech), hopefully the larger vision that really truly drives is this desire to become something larger than ourselves. That touches on another issue, which is that these tools are a form of Dematerialization in that they can be seen as another form of expression of hedonism or materialism. This is not necessarily bad though because through the use of them and the status they confer to us, we may have a lower ecological impact than say other aspects of our modern consumer lifestyles such as our desire to buy expensive, gas guzzling luxury cars. The question is whether the overall resource consumption budget for these online activities is relatively marginal in terms of the Ecological Footprint and even the “social footprint” to sustain them as compared to say other forms of materialistic status conscious consumption.
The bottom line is that many of us who use these tools, is that we aspire to be part of a massive global social movement enabling more effective global collaboration between communities and networks to address World Urgent Issues like AIDS, poverty, Global Climate Change, etc from more of a holistic, community oriented grassroots perspective rather than a top down, linear thinking, authoritarian, elitist, centralized model which for most of the history of human civilization has be the norm for governance and the management of human socioeconomic resources.
And of course in the process of trying to do the above how do we not fall into the trap of becoming “addicted” to the net in the process of committing ourselves to these tools as a way to empower ourselves and humanity?
Because “Empowerment” should ultimately mean that we are driving and controlling technology and not technology driving us. Right now I would have to say that for the bulk of humanity it is the technology and the accompanying economic imperative and delusion of endlessly increasing economic growth and consumption that is the real driver of what we do and how we live our lives as humans on this planet. So in a nutshell to become truly sustainable, we’ll eventually have to figure how to delink consumption with human progress and technological development, because ultimately, the inescapable reality is that we live in a finite world.
Similarly with the net that is just so much we can handle in terms of information and data flows and only so much time to process it. So thus these Web 2.0 tools while in theory can be empowering and revolutionary in terms of how they enable us to share and process information over large global networks also represent a blurring of the lines between work and play, office and home and hence the name “social networking tools.”
Because really as much as some might want to avoid it, the issue is more than a few extreme Internet Addicts dealing with a online porn addiction or some obsessive compulsive disorder that leads to an obsessive amount of time spend posting on social networking sites like twitter…its about how we use our finite time in a world of exponentially increasing information/data/knowledge. I remember when I met Doug Engelbart for the first time in San Jose in 04 and what Ill never forget is how he understood quite clearly something I also had thought about a lot about. That is since modernization began several hundred years ago, the level of knowledge we have has dramatically outpaced our ability to effectively and wisely manage it as well as the ramifications of having that knowledge – in terms of the increasingly technological driven world that arises from and also results from it.
