How did our parents survive without it?
Whether it be emailing lecturers or friends, reading a journal, checking the news, researching an essay, watching a video, listening to a podcast, ordering a book, blogging, sorting out finances or social networking – the Internet is an essential part of our learning and living.
Having access to an online world has resulted in very different lives for this generation compared to those lived by our parents, but there are major concerns that too many young people are addicted to the Internet.
A report from online charity YouthNet, Life Support: Young people’s needs in a digital age, considered the importance of the online world to our lives.
It found that 75 per cent of young people cannot live without the Internet and 45 per cent feel happiest when online.
The report’s author, Professor Michael Hulme, of Lancaster University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, said: “The Internet is central to the lives of young people – it exists for them as part of the fabric of the world.
“Unlike older groups, the Internet is not a place they purposively go to in a self conscious manner, it is just part of the natural behaviour of life.”
Charlie McDonnell, 19, from Bath, is the third most subscribed video blogger on YouTube in the UK with more than 20million hits overall.
He said: “I think when you ask kids: ‘Could you live without the Internet or not’, they will say: ‘Oh no, definitely not’, because it’s such a part of their lives.
“If you took a computer away from a kid for a week – maybe after about a day, they’d be [saying]: ‘I want to search for something on Google’. But after about a week they would understand it’s not completely vital to have the Internet all the time.
“For me personally, the Internet is my career on top of everything else, so I’d have to drastically change my way of living and my life plans if someone pulled the hypothetical plug out on the net.”
McDonnell has helped contribute to the huge amount of videos on YouTube. The sheer scale of this availability makes it very easy to spend far more time than you first intended on the website.
But this concept of there always being something else you can look at is a feature of most sites. Advertisers try to catch your eye, or there might be another article internally for you to read.
As long as you know when to stop and set yourself time limits for going online, there should be no problem. It is when you cannot think or talk about anything else except for using the Internet that help must be sought.
Leading psychiatrist Dr Jerald Block argued last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry that Internet addiction is now a serious public health issue which should be officially recognised as a clinical disorder.
He identified excessive gaming, viewing online explicit content, emailing and text messaging as causes of a compulsive-impulsive disorder.
Symptoms include not eating or sleeping, experiencing genuine withdrawal symptoms if deprived of the Internet, requiring better technology or time online, fatigue, having more arguments and feeling isolated from society.
But Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies at Nottingham Trent University, has pointed out that some people who are seen to have an Internet addiction are actually addicted to something else.
He said: “A lot of these people aren’t addicted to the Internet – they’re addicted to sex or gambling and they use the Internet as a tool.
“You can’t classify an addiction in terms of its medium – if someone’s addicted to gambling and spends all their time in a betting shop, we don’t say they’re addicted to betting shops.”
A clinic opened in Amsterdam three years ago to offer the world’s first treatment for computer game addicts – including those of online games such as World of Warcraft – and it was an immediate success.
Keith Bakker, the American director of the Smith & Jones clinic, is a former drug addict and explained more about the results of computer addiction.
He said: “These are perfectly decent kids whose lives have been taken over by an addiction. Some have given up school. They have no friends. They don’t speak to their parents.
“It is not a chemical dependency, but it’s got everything of an obsessive compulsive disorder and all of the other stuff that comes with chemical dependency.”
The rise of online gaming and social networking has led to many people becoming more obsessed with their own online identity than their real life.
But McDonnell said: “There’s no such thing as a virtual friendship, unless you’re sitting at home trying to have a conversation with your toaster, or replying to a bit of code that you’ve built.
“There are some people that I’ve been working with online for years that I’ve never met in person, but that’s not to say that my relationships with those people aren’t real.”
Andrew Kingston, 21, a third-year Geography student at the University of Sheffield, is currently writing a dissertation about the Internet’s impact on people’s perception of their own social identities.
“Much research has been undertaken upon Social Network Sites (SNS) in recent years – notably on aspects of addiction to a user’s created online persona,” he said.
“People investing abnormal amounts of time into their online personalities can be at risk of having their online personas affect their behaviour and influencing their real world identities.”
Psychologists are still debating whether to label Internet addiction as an addiction indeed or as a mental-health problem.
But the condition exists and the aforementioned research suggests some people might have it without knowing.
There is no doubt that our lives have been changed dramatically by the rise of the Internet. But this has presented us with a challenge – to keep it as something that we can use. Not something that we must use.