Oh, you're telling yourself staying on Facebook for hours at a time is different from G.I. Joe playing World of Tanks on a big-screen TV with full Internet connectivity. It really makes a difference, right? (Science Daily: Internet addiction may indicate other mental health problems in college-aged students)
Maybe the temptation is to think of gamers maybe as you do skaters or surfers to dismiss them as distant loons but they're not so distant and they're not so different. Researchers are taking a look at whether excessive Internet activity is indicative of any type of masking of any other type of psychopathology.
Maybe you want to dismiss that as well with 'all gamers are crackers' but it's bigger than that when Aunt Mabel is pissing away all day posting updates about cats to Facebook. She's not crazy and more likely just she's bored out of her damn mind. If you're wanting her to get up onto a table for tap dances, it's probably not going to happen. In times gone by, maybe, but not now.
The drift of the research is toward internet addiction and understanding it but maybe it's a mistake to regard it as addiction in the first place. For anything to be addictive, it must be inherently attractive but what if it's only an alternative to that which is detractive.
Any gamer playing World of Tanks would probably much rather a real experience although ideally without the hideously painful death part. Aunt Mabel would probably rather play with real cats than pictures of them she found online.
What if something perceived as addiction but actually the Internet is something which congeals around them and it isn't stopped because there's no satisfactory alternative.
The general Rockhouse premise is people aren't seeking the Internet at all and none of us are addicted to it but the absence of satisfactory alternatives leaves no real choice. Who would type anything if we had any choice whatsoever. Sitting in one place for hours is painful and we hate it.
You've got to be careful with those psychologizers since they will want to psychologize just about everything but what if the problem is more sociological than psychological with a model which falls short of The Matrix but it's a similar construct.
What if the evolution is yet to come since the Internet until now has been something we have met with typewriters. Now it's with phones and watches. Eventually there will be some type of interface which isn't a ridiculous pain in the ass to use and then the sociological evolution can get on with business.
There's the much-heralded, at least on Ithaka, Advent of the Robots which some call in fifty years but we're calling in five and, with that, we anticipate major sociological changes due to the upheaval in the workforce and the consequent number of people without jobs. In parallel with that, conceivably the Einsteins are also evolving the hardware past the phones and watches stages such that people achieve yet more independence from any type of formal base stations such as desktop computers, etc.
What happens then, matey mate?
Skip the revolution as we can play Les Mis any time so assume Washington even wised up and has taken whatever measures are needed for social tranquility. It's real and people believe it so now what.
You've got a network of the most closely-connected organisms which ever existed on the planet and they have nothing to do. Take this one to "Weird Science" and we have only one question, "What would you little maniacs like to do first?"
If you're thinking to stick processor chips into their heads so we can turn them into one gigantic computer, now you're thinking the Rockhouse way. Stop on down and meet the Great God Mescalito. He's going to like you.
Maybe the temptation is to think of gamers maybe as you do skaters or surfers to dismiss them as distant loons but they're not so distant and they're not so different. Researchers are taking a look at whether excessive Internet activity is indicative of any type of masking of any other type of psychopathology.
Maybe you want to dismiss that as well with 'all gamers are crackers' but it's bigger than that when Aunt Mabel is pissing away all day posting updates about cats to Facebook. She's not crazy and more likely just she's bored out of her damn mind. If you're wanting her to get up onto a table for tap dances, it's probably not going to happen. In times gone by, maybe, but not now.
The drift of the research is toward internet addiction and understanding it but maybe it's a mistake to regard it as addiction in the first place. For anything to be addictive, it must be inherently attractive but what if it's only an alternative to that which is detractive.
Any gamer playing World of Tanks would probably much rather a real experience although ideally without the hideously painful death part. Aunt Mabel would probably rather play with real cats than pictures of them she found online.
What if something perceived as addiction but actually the Internet is something which congeals around them and it isn't stopped because there's no satisfactory alternative.
The general Rockhouse premise is people aren't seeking the Internet at all and none of us are addicted to it but the absence of satisfactory alternatives leaves no real choice. Who would type anything if we had any choice whatsoever. Sitting in one place for hours is painful and we hate it.
You've got to be careful with those psychologizers since they will want to psychologize just about everything but what if the problem is more sociological than psychological with a model which falls short of The Matrix but it's a similar construct.
What if the evolution is yet to come since the Internet until now has been something we have met with typewriters. Now it's with phones and watches. Eventually there will be some type of interface which isn't a ridiculous pain in the ass to use and then the sociological evolution can get on with business.
There's the much-heralded, at least on Ithaka, Advent of the Robots which some call in fifty years but we're calling in five and, with that, we anticipate major sociological changes due to the upheaval in the workforce and the consequent number of people without jobs. In parallel with that, conceivably the Einsteins are also evolving the hardware past the phones and watches stages such that people achieve yet more independence from any type of formal base stations such as desktop computers, etc.
What happens then, matey mate?
Skip the revolution as we can play Les Mis any time so assume Washington even wised up and has taken whatever measures are needed for social tranquility. It's real and people believe it so now what.
You've got a network of the most closely-connected organisms which ever existed on the planet and they have nothing to do. Take this one to "Weird Science" and we have only one question, "What would you little maniacs like to do first?"
If you're thinking to stick processor chips into their heads so we can turn them into one gigantic computer, now you're thinking the Rockhouse way. Stop on down and meet the Great God Mescalito. He's going to like you.
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