Study Says Some May Be Addicted to the Net

Viktor Brenner wants to know if you’ve ever shared a deep, dark secret with someone on the Internet.

That’s one of the questions that the 29-year-old doctoral student at the State University of New York at Buffalo asks in a survey on the World Wide Web that is, he says, the first research into a phenomenon that may or may not exist: Internet addiction. His initial findings suggest that what has so far appeared only as a hyped anxiety may be a real malady.

Brenner created a web site in January and asked visitors to fill out a survey there on how they use the Internet. Of 185 people who fully completed the survey in its first 30 days, 17% said they spent more than 40 hours a week online, and the average amount of time spent online was 20 hours.

More than half, he found, had been told by others that they spend too much time on the Internet.

“If being on the Net is the only type of social interaction you have, then I think that is a problem,” said Brenner, who works as a student counselor at Marquette University in Milwaukee while finishing his doctoral thesis on panic disorder.

“There are certain ways in which spending too much time online is possibly harmful,” he said. “Not having a sense of social risk, having no guarantee of anything actually being true and having no real physical human contact.”

As a counselor, Brenner heard rumors of Internet addiction, but he soon discovered that “there was no information on the topic,” so he came up with his survey.

The survey marks one of the earliest attempts to provide a statistical backup to the mounds of anecdotal evidence suggesting that a growing number of people is spending unhealthy amounts of time online. Reported problems have included examples of obsessed students falling behind in class and other computer users whose personal relationships have fallen apart as a result of excessive Internet surfing.

Thirty-one percent of survey respondents said their work performance had deteriorated since they started using the Internet; 7% had “gotten into hot water” with their employer or school for Net-related activities.

Brenner acknowledges that his survey is unscientific in many ways; respondents are self-selected and many may be Internet researchers, for example. But he considers his study, which is ongoing, a useful starting point for further research into a behavioral addiction.