There was a similar article in an Australian newspaper (sorry, lost the link) recently about internet 'addiction' as opposed to gaming 'addiction' , saying that excessive internet use put people at risk of depression, and what struck me were two things:
1) The proposed definition was spending more than two hours online outside work, i.e. if you are perpetually plugged in and perpetually available to your manager/employer at an instant's notice, that's no problem, it's using those same technologies recreationally that should be examined as a problem. In my experience, people who use technology a lot at work tend to be the same ones who use it a lot recreationally. I'd take a study like this a lot more seriously if it disaggregated the results by work-use as well. But then, that would run the risk of discovering that requiring your employees to check their email from home, or sleep with their blackberry by the bed so you can always, always reach them is bad for their mental health, and we couldn't open that can of worms, could we?
2) The article asserted that young people who use the internet 'excessively' (again, defined as not employment-related) were at greater risk of depression than their peers who used it less. Now, when I was a 'young person' (back in the paleolithic era) there was no internet. Instead of spending hours in my room chatting online, blogging on myspace and listening to music over youtube, I spent hours in my room writing to my pen pals, writing in my diary and listening to music on the radio. (Readers may not be able to imagine it, but there was a time when entire families depended on one single land-line telephone, usually kept in a common area, thus limiting the amount of time teenagers could spent saying "Like, oh my god, like, totally, like..." to their friends). I suspect that I and similarly introspective and creative teens would have scored higher on the 'risk of depression' index than our jock peers, but no-one checked because writing with pen and paper are good, unlike teh ebil internet. There's a similar phenomenon with the moral panic over cyber-bullying by text message: I can assure you young people that back in the day, just as much psychological harm was caused by the healthy old-fashioned means of passing a note in class as by text messages, but since writing was not a new phenomenon unfamiliar to the oldies of the time, the behavior rather than the technology was identified as the problem.
tl;dr : Professionals need to stop assigning moral values to types of activity if they want people to take their conclusions seriously. "The youth of today!" is not a useful scientific hypothesis.
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Topic: Are you Addicted to gaming? (Read 5345 times)