SURF'S UP

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US psychologist Dr. Kimberley Young, one of the first people to publish a book on IA (Caught in the Net: How to Recognize Signs of Internet Addiction), estimates that there are now more than 8.1 million people with IA most of whom spend more than 40 hours a week online. According to Young those most at risk of becoming addicted are middle-aged housewives and college students.

"The Internet is proving to be another distraction among many to keep students from what they should be doing while they're here ­ which is studying," says York PhD psychology candidate Richard Davis, an expert on IA (see his Web site www.internetaddiction.ca).

There is no clinical definition of IA but the American Psychological Association suggests about 6 per cent of users are affected. The figure, which came from the largest study of Web surfers ever conducted, indicates 200,000 people in the US and 11.4 million worldwide are "addicted", although the AMA no longer uses the term because it says it has lost all clinical meaning.

In an edition of Monitor, the AMA's in-house journal, Carnegie Mellon University's Dr. Sara Kiesler writes,"No research has yet established that there is a disorder of Internet addiction that is separable from problems such as loneliness, or problem gambling, or that a passion for using the Internet is long-lasting....It seems misleading to characterize behaviours as 'addictions' on the basis that people say they do too much of them."