The Internet offers experiences in which people discover things about themselves, good and bad, usually complicated and hard to sort out. People grow and learn and discover new potential. People also discover preoccupations and fantasies that they may have never dealt with before and which may be very troubling. If you call the Internet addicting, then you have to call all powerful, evocative experience addicting. I think that many of our anxieties about the Internet are a displacement of other anxieties about the power of technology in our lives.
People feel that computers are getting out of control, and they fear they can do nothing about it.
Then they seize on the Internet and imagine that this is a place where they can exert control. So they focus on censorship, on pornography, on filters. Similarly, people despair about the state of education and look to the Internet for a technological fix. It would be better if we faced our real fears. I'm working on ways in which the computer is beginning to impinge on our notions of bodies and what a body can be.