Try to make me go to rehab

Fellow students, you can relax. You are no longer responsible for the all-nighters you pulled during midterms. The blame for your procrastination can finally be placed on a greater force than yourself, when you are diagnosed with the hot new disorder you’re guaranteed to have: Internet Addiction Disorder, also known as IAD.

Apparently, IAD is real. Most commonly, the disorder is associated with live gaming, but symptoms include the inability to stop browsing and irritability when you cannot get to a computer — feelings most college students have likely experienced. Internet addiction is linked with ADD, which is understandable because of the web’s fast-paced nature and the plethora of — ooh look, Google changed its logo!

As I was saying, because the Internet offers so much information in such an accessible way, it is a monster that draws out the ADD in all of us. We are then faced with a classic case of the chicken and the egg — is our inability to focus because we are addicted to the Internet, or are we addicted to the Internet because we cannot focus?

Perhaps our attention spans have been shortened by the pure laziness we’ve developed. We’ve let the Internet substitute quick, easy solutions for inconveniences we didn’t know we had. Today, we watch our favorite shows on Hulu and manage our bank accounts without actually stepping foot into a bank.

It seems like only yesterday the Internet was more of a hassle than it was handy, taking forever to load ugly interfaces and useless pages that would have paled in comparison to today’s Wikipedia. Now, the Internet offers us a blissful shopping experience in our underwear, and as soon as we click “Place Order,” we can return to Facebook stalking.

As Rainn Wilson sarcastically tweeted this weekend, “This Internet thing is really catching on.” The Internet has made its mark on almost every industry and individual. In turn, the industries and individuals have made their marks on the Internet, offering their goods and services in online form. As the Internet fills the role of the original mediums it was intended to supplement, it becomes integrated with society, an almost mandatory part of our day-to-day existence.

This is precisely what makes being addicted to the Internet just that much harder — you can’t stop using the Internet just like an alcoholic can’t stop drinking. You would be doing yourself more harm than good, especially if you were enrolled in school.

The nation’s first IAD rehab center, reSTART, tries to help those committed rediscover a balance between the dot-coms and their “real” lives. It seems this balance, however, is already skewed. A New York Times article said we spend 8.5 hours a day looking at screens of some sort, and, with respect to college students, that sounds like an understatement. The question then becomes what is socially mandated digital interaction and what is simply fluff.

Because of the Internet’s inevitable prevalence in our “real” lives, treating IAD as a disease just seems excessive. The Internet is becoming such a dominant way of life that it’s as if we are diagnosing people with a breathing problem. It would probably be more beneficial to simply focus on regulating content, as it is the sites with seemingly no merit that manage to suck the most of my productivity away.

Regulating content could also lessen our desire for instant gratification by helping to put industries back where they belong. The television industry would appreciate being watched as intended — on a television — and the music industry would like it if people stopped stealing its product.

At the end of the day, it’s just an intangible web of zeroes and ones hiding behind a screen. But we become enthralled with that screen, interacting with the binary numbers and viewing their translations as meaningful. We allow these simulated experiences to replace real ones, and suddenly e-zines are replacing magazines, poking on Facebook replaces poking in real life (OK, maybe that is for the better).

Whether or not we are addicted to our screens and what’s behind them is debatable. What is not is the fact that a whole lot of us waste an immeasurable amount of time surfing the net. While this can be justified by pointing fingers at society’s laziness and the crazy social obligations of the new millennium, we’ve got to remember that we shaped this reality and did this to ourselves.

Of course, if fighting the desire to go online for anything and everything someday seems like too much, you can always check yourself into reSTART.

Jen Winston is a junior majoring in communication. Her column, “The Memeing of Life,” runs Tuesdays.