Internet Addiction

My work on substance abuse prevention has led to a new topic. Families these days are dealing with internet addiction in teens and it can have negative effects ranging from slightly annoying to life threatening and dangerous.

I’m still learning about this new topic, but here’s what I have so far.

Teens in 2022 are under tremendous pressure to be available via internet at all times. Their friends expect them to be ready to chat and if they are not they can face a loss of status in the friend group. The websites and apps used most often include Instagram, Discord, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. Facebook is only for old people and is considered boring. Discord has increasing popularity because adults don’t know about it and don’t monitor it as closely as some of the others.

The social pressure from their friend group is what initially sparks high levels of engagement. Teens will spend many hours online, sometimes late into the night. This often results in sleep disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, and missing school. Once teens develop the habit of spending 12-18 hours per day online, they become vulnerable to a variety of dangers and self destructive behaviors, including:

• being groomed by pedophiles
• playing addictive video games for many hours
• discussions, statements, or pictures about suicides where suicidal ideation is encouraged or indirectly rewarded with increased attention and likes
• developing co-dependent relationships with mentally ill internet users from hundreds of miles away
• losing touch with family and friends who are local
• developing low quality friendships

My informal research with teens shows that they make new friends in 3 different ways. The first is shared interest and activities related to these interests. For example, a child interested in soccer would tend to make friends in his youth soccer league. The second way teens meet friends is to be thrown into situations by adults where the child did not choose the activity, such as school and family parties. Kids will make friends in school even if the friends they are meeting do not have a shared interest. Kids in this situation may develop converging shared interests over a long term friendship. The third place kids make friends is via the internet in chat rooms or on social media.

When asked to rank the quality of these friendships, kids consistently rank “shared interest” as the most high quality, and internet friends are the lowest quality. Furthermore, teens are able to identify “toxic relationships” and “toxic people” and they consistently state that these relationships start as online friendships far more often than the other two ways of sourcing friendships.

I’ve had a number of discussions with teens about tech companies and how they use manipulative tactics to trick the public into spending more time on social media. We’ve talked about the negativity machine, the Facebook/Instagram algorithm, the slot machine type tactics, the dopamine hits that come from likes, surveillance capitalism, “The Social Dilemna,” etc.

As it turns out, many teens already know about all about this stuff. They know the tech companies would love to turn them into slaves …. I mean consumer-workers….living on basic universal income while the tech companies strip our local communities of wealth and value in the name of increasing stock prices. Some of them even know about the tech billionaires building bunkers for an extinction event.

The kids don’t really care. The short term consequences of avoiding social media are simply to devastating. If they were to delete social media, the loss of social status would be far more damaging to them in the short term than anything the tech companies are cooking up to enslave the rest of us. Score one for the tech billionaires!

In order to deal with the damaging psychological effects of internet addiction, parents are trying some new tactics. The most common and effective is to take away the smart phone and give their child a flip phone with limited capabilities. Some of these flip phones can’t accept any incoming calls, in other cases they can accepts only calls from the parents, some can’t make any outgoing calls. All of these phones have zero internet capacility. This has been effective in reducing internet usage. Some households have a war going on where parents limit access via the router and kids figure out how to hack the router.

Along with limiting internet usage, parents are lookign for therapy sessions, psychiatric treatment, and in some cases hospital stays after a suicide attempt. The problem can be very severe when combined with other mental illnesses.

I’m still learning more about this new topic and what types of help are available. Check back on my next blog post for more info.