Mais uma para a série "Metalinguagem": cuspindo no prato em que blogo (ou blogando no prato em que cuspo?)
Autor: Mayra Borges | Publicado: 2012-07-09T22:47:00-03:00

http://www.newsweekinternational.com/newsweek/2012/07/08/is-the-internet-making-us-crazy-what-the-new-research-says.html





Is the Web Driving Us Mad?
Jul 9, 2012 1:00 AM EDT
 
 
 
 





 Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can 
make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of 
mental illness, Tony Dokoupil reports.


 



Before he launched the most viral video in Internet history, Jason Russell
 was a half-hearted Web presence. His YouTube account was dead, and his 
Facebook and Twitter pages were a trickle of kid pictures and 
home-garden updates. The Web wasn’t made “to keep track of how much 
people like us,” he thought, and when his own tech habits made him feel 
like “a genius, an addict, or a megalomaniac,” he unplugged for days, 
believing, as the humorist Andy Borowitz put it in a tweet that Russell 
tagged as a favorite, “it’s important to turn off our computers and do 
things in the real world.”

 


But
 this past March Russell struggled to turn off anything. He forwarded a 
link to “Kony 2012,” his deeply personal Web documentary about the African warlord Joseph Kony.
 The idea was to use social media to make Kony famous as the first step 
to stopping his crimes. And it seemed to work: the film hurtled through 
cyberspace, clocking more than 70 million views in less than a week. But
 something happened to Russell in the process. The same digital tools 
that supported his mission seemed to tear at his psyche, exposing him to
 nonstop kudos and criticisms, and ending his arm’s-length relationship 
with new media.


He
 slept two hours in the first four days, producing a swirl of bizarre 
Twitter updates. He sent a link to “I Met the Walrus,” a short animated 
interview with John Lennon, urging followers to “start training your 
mind.” He sent a picture of his tattoo, TIMSHEL, a biblical word about 
man’s choice between good and evil. At one point he uploaded and 
commented on a digital photo of a text message from his mother. At 
another he compared his life to the mind-bending movie Inception, “a dream inside a dream.”


On
 the eighth day of his strange, 21st-century vortex, he sent a final 
tweet—a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “If you can’t fly, then run, 
if you can’t run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever
 you do, you have to keep moving forward”—and walked back into the real 
world. He took off his clothes and went to the corner of a busy 
intersection near his home in San Diego, where he repeatedly slapped the
 concrete with both palms and ranted about the devil. This too became a 
viral video.


Afterward
 Russell was diagnosed with “reactive psychosis,” a form of temporary 
insanity. It had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol, his wife, Danica, 
stressed in a blog post, and everything to do with the machine that kept
 Russell connected even as he was breaking apart. “Though new to us,” 
Danica continued, “doctors say this is a common experience,” given 
Russell’s “sudden transition from relative anonymity to worldwide 
attention—both raves and ridicules.” More than four months later, Jason 
is out of the hospital, his company says, but he is still in recovery. 
His wife took a “month of silence” on Twitter. Jason’s social-media 
accounts remain dark.


Tony Dokoupil on how the web affects mental health.&nbsp;

&nbsp;
 
 


Questions
 about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as 
old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new 
technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to
 a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a
 cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. 
Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery 
system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more 
productive. And where was the proof otherwise?


Now,
 however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, 
peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier 
than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current 
incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and 
all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more 
depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and 
attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized 
minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are 
breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.






In
 the summer of 1996, seven young researchers at MIT blurred the lines 
between man and computer, living simultaneously in the physical and 
virtual worlds. They carried keyboards in their pockets, 
radio-transmitters in their backpacks, and a clip-on screen in front of 
their eyes. They called themselves “cyborgs”—and they were freaks. But 
as Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, points out, “we are all cyborgs
 now.” This life of continuous connection has come to seem normal, but 
that’s not the same as saying that it’s healthy or sustainable, as 
technology—to paraphrase the old line about alcohol—becomes the cause of
 and solution to of all life’s problems.




In
 less than the span of a single childhood, Americans have merged with 
their machines, staring at a screen for at least eight hours a day, more
 time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping. Teens fit 
some seven hours of screen time into the average school day; 11, if you 
count time spent multitasking on several devices. When President Obama 
last ran for office, the iPhone had yet to be launched. Now smartphones 
outnumber the old models in America, and more than a third of users get 
online before getting out of bed.





Meanwhile,
 texting has become like blinking: the average person, regardless of 
age, sends or receives about 400 texts a month, four times the 2007 
number. The average teen processes an astounding 3,700 texts a month, 
double the 2007 figure. And more than two thirds of these normal, 
everyday cyborgs, myself included, report feeling their phone vibrate 
when in fact nothing is happening. Researchers call it 
“phantom-vibration syndrome.”





 Photo Illustration by Justin Metz





Altogether
 the digital shifts of the last five years call to mind a horse that has
 sprinted out from underneath its rider, dragging the person who once 
held the reins. No one is arguing for some kind of Amish future. But the
 research is now making it clear that the Internet is not “just” another
 delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a 
digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning 
instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.


“This
 is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change,” says 
Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford University who is 
working on a book about how digital culture is rewiring us—and not for 
the better. “We could create the most wonderful world for our kids but 
that’s not going to happen if we’re in denial and people sleepwalk into 
these technologies and end up glassy-eyed zombies.”


Does
 the Internet make us crazy? Not the technology itself or the content, 
no. But a Newsweek review of findings from more than a dozen countries 
finds the answers pointing in a similar direction. Peter Whybrow, the 
director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at 
UCLA, argues that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” fueling 
cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches. The Internet “leads to
 behavior that people are conscious is not in their best interest and 
does leave them anxious and does make them act compulsively,” says 
Nicholas Carr, whose book The Shallows, about the Web’s effect on
 cognition, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It “fosters our 
obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions,” adds Larry Rosen, a 
California psychologist who has researched the Net’s effect for decades.
 It “encourages—and even promotes—insanity.”


Fear
 that the Internet and mobile technology contributes to addiction—not to
 mention the often related ADHD and OCD disorders—has persisted for 
decades, but for most of that time the naysayers prevailed, often 
puckishly. “What’s next? Microwave abuse and Chapstick addiction?” wrote
 a peer reviewer for one of the leading psychiatric journals, rejecting a
 national study of problematic Internet use in 2006. The Diagnostic and 
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has never included a category of 
machine-human interactions.





But
 that view is suddenly on the outs. When the new DSM is released next 
year, Internet Addiction Disorder will be included for the first time, 
albeit in an appendix tagged for “further study.” China, Taiwan, and 
Korea recently accepted the diagnosis, and began treating problematic 
Web use as a grave national health crisis. In those countries, where 
tens of millions of people (and as much as 30 percent of teens) are 
considered Internet-addicted, mostly to gaming, virtual reality, and 
social media, the story is sensational front-page news. One young couple
 neglected its infant to death while nourishing a virtual baby online. A
 young man fatally bludgeoned his mother for suggesting he log off (and 
then used her credit card to rack up more hours). At least 10 ultra-Web 
users, serviced by one-click noodle delivery, have died of blood clots 
from sitting too long.


Now
 the Korean government is funding treatment centers, and coordinating a 
late-night Web shutdown for young people. China, meanwhile, has launched
 a mothers’ crusade for safe Web habits, turning to that approach after 
it emerged that some doctors were using electro-shock and severe 
beatings to treat Internet-addicted teens.



“There’s
 just something about the medium that’s addictive,” says Elias 
Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine, 
where he directs the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic and Impulse 
Control Disorders Clinic. “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no 
history of addictive behavior—or substance abuse of any kind—become 
addicted via the Internet and these other technologies.”
















His
 2006 study of problematic Web habits (the one that was puckishly 
rejected) was later published, forming the basis for his recent book Virtually You,
 about the fallout expected from the Web’s irresistible allure. Even 
among a demographic of middle-aged landline users—the average respondent
 was in his 40s, white, and making more than $50,000 a year—Aboujaoude 
found that more than one in eight showed at least one sign of an 
unhealthy attachment to the Net. More recent surveys that recruit people
 already online have found American numbers on a par with those in Asia.






 The brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like the brains of drug 
and alcohol addicts. (Mariette Carstens / Hollandse Hoogte-Redux)





Then
 there was the University of Maryland’s 2010 “Unplugged” experiment that
 asked 200 undergrads to forgo all Web and mobile technologies for a day
 and to keep a diary of their feelings. “I clearly am addicted and the 
dependency is sickening,” reported one student in the study. “Media is 
my drug,” wrote another. At least two other schools haven’t even been 
able to get such an experiment off the ground for lack of participants. 
“Most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable, 
to be without their media links to the world,” the University of 
Maryland concluded.



That
 same year two psychiatrists in Taiwan made headlines with the idea of 
iPhone addiction disorder. They documented two cases from their own 
practices: one involved a high-school boy who ended up in an asylum 
after his iPhone usage reached 24 hours a day. The other featured a 
31-year-old saleswoman who used her phone while driving. Both cases 
might have been laughed off if not for a 200-person Stanford study of 
iPhone habits released at the same time. It found that one in 10 users 
feels “fully addicted” to his or her phone. All but 6 percent of the 
sample admitted some level of compulsion, while 3 percent won’t let 
anyone else touch their phones.



In the two years since, concern over the Web’s pathological stickiness has only intensified. In April, doctors told The Times of India
 about an anecdotal uptick in “Facebook addiction.” The latest details 
of America’s Web obsession are found in Larry Rosen’s new book, iDisorder,
 which, despite the hucksterish title, comes with the imprimatur of the 
world’s largest academic publisher. His team surveyed 750 people, a 
spread of teens and adults who represented the Southern California 
census, detailing their tech habits, their feelings about those habits, 
and their scores on a series of standard tests of psychiatric disorders.
 He found that most respondents, with the exception of those over the 
age of 50, check text messages, email or their social network “all the 
time” or “every 15 minutes.” More worryingly, he also found that those 
who spent more time online had more “compulsive personality traits.”


Perhaps
 not that surprising: those who want the most time online feel compelled
 to get it. But in fact these users don’t exactly want to be so 
connected. It’s not quite free choice that drives most young corporate 
employees (45 and under) to keep their BlackBerrys in the bedroom within
 arms’ reach, per a 2011 study; or free choice, per another 2011 study, 
that makes 80 percent of vacationers bring along laptops or smartphones 
so they can check in with work while away; or free choice that leads 
smartphone users to check their phones before bed, in the middle of the 
night, if they stir, and within minutes of waking up.





We
 may appear to be choosing to use this technology, but in fact we are 
being dragged to it by the potential of short-term rewards. Every ping 
could be social, sexual, or professional opportunity, and we get a 
mini-reward, a squirt of dopamine, for answering the bell. “These 
rewards serve as jolts of energy that recharge the compulsion engine, 
much like the frisson a gambler receives as a new card hits the table,” MIT media scholar Judith Donath recently told Scientific American. “Cumulatively, the effect is potent and hard to resist.”




Recently
 it became possible to watch this kind of Web use rewire the brain. In 
2008 Gary Small, the head of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center, 
was the first to document changes in the brain as a result of even 
moderate Internet use. He rounded up 24 people, half of them experienced
 Web users, half of them newbies, and he passed them each through a 
brain scanner. The difference was striking, with the Web users 
displaying fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes. But the real 
surprise was what happened next. The novices went away for a week, and 
were asked to spend a total of five hours online and then return for 
another scan. “The naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” he 
later wrote, musing darkly about what might happen when we spend more 
time online.

























The
 brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug 
and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese 
researchers found “abnormal white matter”—essentially extra nerve cells 
built for speed—in the areas charged with attention, control, and 
executive function. A parallel study found similar changes in the brains
 of videogame addicts. And both studies come on the heels of other 
Chinese results that link Internet addiction to “structural 
abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in 
the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, 
motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the 
shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed
 signs of “atrophy.”





While
 brain scans don’t reveal which came first, the abuse or the brain 
changes, many clinicians feel their own observations confirmed. “There’s
 little doubt we’re becoming more impulsive,” says Stanford’s 
Aboujaoude, and one reason for this is technology use. He points to the 
rise in OCD and ADHD diagnosis, the latter of which has risen 66 percent
 in the last decade. “There is a cause and effect.”



And
 don’t kid yourself: the gap between an “Internet addict” and John Q. 
Public is thin to nonexistent. One of the early flags for addiction was 
spending more than 38 hours a week online. By that definition, we are 
all addicts now, many of us by Wednesday afternoon, Tuesday if it’s a 
busy week. Current tests for Internet addiction are qualitative, casting
 an uncomfortably wide net, including people who admit that yes, they 
are restless, secretive, or preoccupied with the Web and that they have 
repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to cut back. But if this is 
unhealthy, it’s clear many Americans don’t want to be well.



Like
 addiction, the digital connection to depression and anxiety was also 
once a near laughable assertion. A 1998 Carnegie Mellon study found that
 Web use over a two-year period was linked to blue moods, loneliness, 
and the loss of real-world friends. But the subjects all lived in 
Pittsburgh, critics sneered. Besides, the Net might not bring you 
chicken soup, but it means the end of solitude, a global village of 
friends, and friends you haven’t met yet. Sure enough, when Carnegie 
Mellon checked back in with the denizens of Steel City a few years 
later, they were happier than ever.



But
 the black crow is back on the wire. In the past five years, numerous 
studies have duplicated the original Carnegie Mellon findings and 
extended them, showing that the more a person hangs out in the global 
village, the worse they are likely to feel. Web use often displaces 
sleep, exercise, and face-to-face exchanges, all of which can upset even
 the chirpiest soul. But the digital impact may last not only for a day 
or a week, but for years down the line. A recent American study based on
 data from adolescent Web use in the 1990s found a connection between 
time online and mood disorders in young adulthood. Chinese researchers 
have similarly found “a direct effect” between heavy Net use and the 
development of full-blown depression, while scholars at Case Western 
Reserve University correlated heavy texting and social-media use with 
stress, depression, and suicidal thinking.



In response to this work, an article in the journal Pediatrics
 noted the rise of “a new phenomenon called ‘Facebook depression,’?” and
 explained that “the intensity of the online world may trigger 
depression.” Doctors, according to the report published by the American 
Academy of Pediatrics, should work digital usage questions into every 
annual checkup.



Rosen, the author of iDisorder,
 points to a preponderance of research showing “a link between Internet 
use, instant messaging, emailing, chatting, and depression among 
adolescents,” as well as to the “strong relationships between video 
gaming and depression.” But the problem seems to be quality as well as 
quantity: bad interpersonal experiences—so common online—can lead to 
these potential spirals of despair. For her book Alone Together, 
MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle interviewed more than 450 people, most of
 them in their teens and 20s, about their lives online. And while she’s 
the author of two prior tech-positive books, and once graced the cover 
of Wired magazine, she now reveals a sad, stressed-out world of 
people coated in Dorito dust and locked in a dystopian relationship with
 their machines.




People
 tell her that their phones and laptops are the “place for hope” in 
their lives, the “place where sweetness comes from.” Children describe 
mothers and fathers unavailable in profound ways, present and yet not 
there at all. “Mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their 
babies as they text,” she told the American Psychological Association 
last summer. “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be 
experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to 
interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with 
the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely.” 
She added, “Technology can make us forget important things we know about
 life.”

































This
 evaporation of the genuine self also occurred among the high-school- 
and college-age kids she interviewed. They were struggling with digital 
identities at an age when actual identity is in flux. “What I learned in
 high school,” a kid named Stan told Turkle, “was profiles, profiles, 
profiles; how to make a me.” It’s a nerve-racking learning curve, a life
 lived entirely in public with the webcam on, every mistake recorded and
 shared, mocked until something more mockable comes along. “How long do I
 have to do this?” another teen sighed, as he prepared to reply to 100 
new messages on his phone.





Last
 year, when MTV polled its 13- to 30-year-old viewers on their Web 
habits, most felt “defined” by what they put online, “exhausted” by 
always having to be putting it out there, and utterly unable to look 
away for fear of missing out. “FOMO,” the network called it. “I saw the 
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical 
naked,” begins Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, a beatnik rant that 
opens with people “dragging themselves” at dawn, searching for an “angry
 fix” of heroin. It’s not hard to imagine the alternative imagery today.



The
 latest Net-and-depression study may be the saddest one of all. With 
consent of the subjects, Missouri State University tracked the real-time
 Web habits of 216 kids, 30 percent of whom showed signs of depression. 
The results, published last month, found that the depressed kids were 
the most intense Web users, chewing up more hours of email, chat, 
videogames, and file sharing. They also opened, closed, and switched 
browser windows more frequently, searching, one imagines, and not 
finding what they hoped to find.



They
 each sound like Doug, a Midwestern college student who maintained four 
avatars, keeping each virtual world open on his computer, along with his
 school work, email, and favorite videogames. He told Turkle that his 
real life is “just another window”—and “usually not my best one.” Where 
is this headed? she wonders. That’s the scariest line of inquiry of all.



Recently,
 scholars have begun to suggest that our digitized world may support 
even more extreme forms of mental illness. At Stanford, Dr. Aboujaoude 
is studying whether some digital selves should be counted as a 
legitimate, pathological “alter of sorts,” like the alter egos 
documented in cases of multiple personality disorder (now called 
dissociative identity disorder in the DSM). To test his idea, he gave 
one of his patients, Richard, a mild-mannered human-resources executive 
with a ruthless Web poker habit, the official test for multiple 
personality disorder. The result was startling. He scored as high as 
patient zero. “I might as well have been ... administering the 
questionnaire to Sybil Dorsett!” Aboujaoude writes.



The
 Gold brothers—Joel, a psychiatrist at New York University, and Ian, a 
philosopher and psychiatrist at McGill University—are investigating 
technology’s potential to sever people’s ties with reality, fueling 
hallucinations, delusions, and genuine psychosis, much as it seemed to 
do in the case of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind “Kony 2012.” The 
idea is that online life is akin to life in the biggest city, stitched 
and sutured together by cables and modems, but no less mentally real—and
 taxing—than New York or Hong Kong. “The data clearly support the view 
that someone who lives in a big city is at higher risk of psychosis than
 someone in a small town,” Ian Gold writes via email. “If the Internet 
is a kind of imaginary city,” he continues. “It might have some of the 
same psychological impact.”



A
 team of researchers at Tel Aviv University is following a similar path.
 Late last year, they published what they believe are the first 
documented cases of “Internet-related psychosis.” The qualities of 
online communication are capable of generating “true psychotic 
phenomena,” the authors conclude, before putting the medical community 
on warning. “The spiraling use of the Internet and its potential 
involvement in psychopathology are new consequences of our times.”



So
 what do we do about it? Some would say nothing, since even the best 
research is tangled in the timeless conundrum of what comes first. Does 
the medium break normal people with its unrelenting presence, endless 
distractions, and threat of public ridicule for missteps? Or does it 
attract broken souls?



But
 in a way, it doesn’t matter whether our digital intensity is causing 
mental illness, or simply encouraging it along, as long as people are 
suffering. Overwhelmed by the velocity of their lives, we turn to 
prescription drugs, which helps explain why America runs on Xanax (and 
why rehab admissions for benzodiazepines, the ingredient in Xanax and 
other anti-anxiety drugs, have tripled since the late 1990s). We also 
spring for the false rescue of multitasking, which saps attention even 
when the computer is off. And all of us, since the relationship with the
 Internet began, have tended to accept it as is, without much conscious 
thought about how we want it to be or what we want to avoid. Those days 
of complacency should end. The Internet is still ours to shape. Our 
minds are in the balance.&nbsp;


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 long.




Tony Dokoupil is a senior writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.


É claro que eu vou entender os dois links-convites aí em cima, no finalzinho, como uma piada sarcástica (e são, né?) Fico devendo a tradução do artigo (não, ela não vai entrar para a série "Promessas do blog que eu nunca cumpro". Prometo ;) )