[Mezzie]

The claims are missing an important variable when trying to determine if a behavior is harmful: The social context of that behavior.

In the context of the 90s (and especially for adults), spending too much time online was, in some ways, an inherently anti-social act: You had to be physically tethered to the machine, often monopolizing the only other of long-distance communication available (the landline phone line) for the entire house, and, when people and households shared computers, it often meant others COULDN'T use the tool.

In 2021, none of that is true.

Also, there were certain cultural ideas about what types of 'socializing'/'friends' counted as well as what constituted 'normal' behavior.

It's entirely possible Internet addiction is real and this article is interesting as one of the first to mention such a thing, but the Internet and Web just hadn't been embedded into society well enough to be evaluated.

[bumby]

I think the context was described. The article lists 5 dimensions where adverse behavior was documented: academic, relationship, financial, occupational, and physical. While I think you may be right about the different socializing role of the internet 25 years later, I'm not sure that explains away the adverse affects across all those dimensions. For example, with online gambling becoming more of a norm now, that doesn't mean the adverse financial aspects are any less bad. Normalization of deviance doesn't equate to unharmful.

[Mezzie]

That's a fair point.

I think the difficulty here is that because we had no way of knowing there things were going back in 1996, they didn't ask the questions/gather the information we would need in order to do the apples-to-apples comparison we'd need between these behaviors and their harms in 1996 and in 2021.

They wouldn't think to consider physical isolation separately from internet use: Unless you were hauling your machine to LAN parties, being on a computer was physically isolating. Likewise, monitors and accessories are way better ergonomically now so spending 60 hours a week online now is probably LESS damaging than it used to be (but still damaging).

Also, some degree of these impairments is acceptable depending on the reason: Most people in the trades aren't doing well physically after decades, we just don't care because they bring value. How much of the 'worry' about their physical state is because they weren't destroying their bodies doing something that made $$?

I'd be curious if you (or anybody) knows if gambling IN GENERAL is better or worse than it was 30 years ago. If online gambling is more of a norm now, is that due to non-gamblers starting to gamble, or are the people who would've been at the casino every weekend just saving the gas?

We can't solve these issues unless we know if the internet is a symptom or the cause.

[bumby]

I don't know, but a quick search on Google Scholar seems to indicate that Internet gambling makes gambling worse for those who already have a predisposition for gambling problems. It seems to be more about availability, as "land-based" casinos mediate the Internet effect somewhat.

[Mezzie]

Yeah, that's a really good point. In which case perhaps the problem could be mitigated through things like mandatory artificial 'difficulty' in design/UX, and, if so, we would know to be on the lookout for that in any OTHER new technology we create down the road as well and design for it.

[bumby]

I think that is an interesting take, but would obviously have a lot of pushback. I doubt private industry would willingly work against their own profit incentive. Can you imagine if the government mandated social media sites to limit the use of algorithms to grab people's attention?