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Tech

You Are Addicted to the Internet, Says This Test

The rise of the Internet addiction now feels terribly predictable, and not because the Internet seems so pervasive now. So many new media and pastimes and other fun and interesting things throughout history have been labeled as "addictive" or "bad." We...

The rise of the Internet addiction now feels terribly predictable, and not because the Internet seems so pervasive now. So many new media and pastimes and other fun and interesting things throughout history have been labeled as “addictive” or “bad.” We’re reminded of this by the Times’ Virginia Heffernan (clearly an Internet addict herself), as she points us to a suspiciously easy-to-pass self-administered online test, launched in 1988 and still at the top of your nervous Google searches for “internet addiction.”

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The test measures your addiction from “mild” to “severe,” with the certainty that comes only from questions like “How often do you check your e-mail before something else that you need to do?” or “How often do you fear that life without the Internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?”

Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been represented as craven and diseased. Opera obsession leads to delinquency in Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 film "Diva"; an intense movie habit deepens the alienation of the hero of Walker Percy's 1961 novel "The Moviegoer." Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind, have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, "Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity." The 18th-century worry about female literacy is not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls vulnerable to "predators": "Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice." Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts ("I'm addicted to the symphony!") or just absurd.

Read more of Heffernan (in her first column in the op-ed section!) at the Times.