His study, which he expects to be published this summer in The Journal of American College Health, used the criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, which researchers use to define dependency on substances like alcohol and habits like gambling. The students who were identified as dependent spent an average of 229 minutes a day using the Internet for nonacademic reasons, compared with 73 minutes a day for others, Mr. Anderson said. As many as 6 percent of the students spent an average of over 400 minutes a day using the Internet. Dependent users reported negative consequences. Grades decline, mostly because attendance declines.
Sleep patterns go down.
Technology could be a really wonderful thing, but if we don't start looking at some of the consequences, we'll take the ostrich approach with our heads in the sand and let the problems sneak up on us. As part of the study, students were asked to rate the degree to which their Internet usage affected their real-life relationships, academic success, participation in extracurricular activities, sleep patterns, and meeting new people. For the study, Mr. Anderson counted Internet activities not related to class work, including sending or receiving e-mail, browsing the World Wide Web, downloading software, and participating in cybersex, graphic interactive games, newsgroups, and online communities. The participants were students from American International University, Black Hawk College, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rensselaer, Siena College, the State University of New York at Albany, SUNY at Buffalo, and one institution in Ireland. They were evenly divided among men and women, and they represented 18 different majors, from liberal arts to hard sciences.