Slippery slope to internet addiction

IT has been a week of the utmost tranquility. Thanks to the availability of a static caravan for the borrowing, Helen and I have been nestled in the Lake District in Cumbria, England.

The national park area is littered with picture-postcard beauty and teeming with Middle England types indulging their love of outdoor pursuits. Looking around the area, it is possible to put faces on the “squeezed middle”, so often a feature of political discourse in Westminster. This is the England of Tory dreams, quaint and rural; essentially an Arcadian utopia writ large on the landscape. This image of an idealised past has formed part of our experience too, it has to be said. For the last number of days, we have been without the benefits of modern communications. Our mobile phones offer no signal and internet access has been something of a dim and distant dream.
Of course, in order to file this work I have had to find an outlet, in a centre of population, which is boldly staking a claim in modernity by offering visitors and inhabitants the chance to connect to the World Wide Web. I have been surprised by how hungrily I have surfed the net since arriving in the town. I have read emails, consulted Twitter and glanced at Facebook. In addition, I have been trawling the news pages of The Irish Times and The Clare Champion. In terms of what might have been referred to as ‘correspondence’ I have missed little but there was a comfort in confirming that aside from the odd message or email, my world remained largely unchanged from when I last plugged into the global network.
Certainly, it was great to catch up with all the news from home but I found myself wondering if my itch to be informed on a daily, even hourly, basis of what was happening in Ireland and Clare was altogether warranted. Should I not just have enjoyed the holiday and the rare opportunity to disconnect with the world for a few of days?
Helen and I had discussed our digital isolation in the previous few days. She was rejoicing in the lack of communication but I was finding it a little strange because there was no shortage of media to be enjoyed. The radio was a constant background hum in the mobile home and both of us read voraciously, listened to music and watched television for an hour or two at night. I was perplexed by the fact that I would feel the lack of interactive, digital communications so keenly.
While the information I was consuming was prescribed, it was of a fine quality and certainly superior to what I might have been imbibing on the internet.
The ubiquitous nature of the internet in my everyday life, both social and working, has to a certain extent crept up on me. It is a tool to which I turn in many situations. Institutions, companies and governments encourage me to use it so they can cut their manpower costs and friends all over the world maintain regular, cheap contact through it on a daily basis.
I can watch and listen to Irish television and radio programmes to keep abreast of the ebb and flow of politics at home, something which has made a massive difference to my life in the last few years, so I suppose it is only natural to miss it when it is taken away. Similarly, through text messaging I can maintain a daily contact with loved ones at home so it is not unusual to miss it.
For many years, successive Irish governments have left many people in the country unable to access the internet through a broadband connection. The virtues of such access have been extolled by both business and political leaders but there has been little by way of follow-through.
This situation can be said to stem mostly from the privatisation of Telecom Éireann but the way the problem has been tackled has left a lot to be desired. For people living in rural areas, a slight improvement has come about in recent years but there remains a mountain to be climbed with regard to connectivity.
The latest internet usage statistics show 3,042,600 internet users as of June 2010, 65.8% of the population. This is up from 20.9% in the year 2000. It is important to remember when viewing these figures that there remains a gap between internet access and broadband access. There seems a certain mismatch between access to a quality, cheap and effective broadband connection and the amount of business people are being asked to do online.
We are encouraged to undertake as much of our banking, business and recreation online as possible, while many people remain unable to access the outside world digitally from their homes. There were 1,705,460 Facebook users on August 31, 2010, a 36.9% penetration rate, though whether people registered at home or from somewhere else is unclear.
As with many promoted and encouraged activities, alcohol and the advertising of it springs to mind, a darker side of increased internet usage has emerged in recent years. The pathology of “internet addiction” is fast gaining a foothold in modern psychological discourse. A set of 20 questions is available, online ironically, for those who wish to test themselves to see whether they need to seek ‘treatment’ for the new ‘illness’.
Within a day I will be back at the desk where I work with an “always on” broadband connection. In my pocket will be a, once again functioning, phone through which I can access the internet while away from the desk. However, while I use these tools to work and play, I must remain mindful of the dangers they present. In making us always available, these privileges bring expectation on the part of others that we will be so.
This attitude is culturally acceptable and brings with it a raft of new pressures but slip too deep into this encouraged culture and you may find yourself with a classifiable mental illness called addiction. A tightrope without doubt and one that will grow increasingly thinner, higher and more difficult to navigate in the coming years. Now, back to my book.