Hooked on the Web

It is hard to believe that the following article appeared three ago, since the prominence and lure of the Web has increased markedly

Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way
By Sarah Kershaw c New York Times

The waiting room for Hilarie Cash's practice has the look and feel of many a therapist's office, with soothing classical music, paintings of gentle swans and colorful flowers and on the bookshelves stacks of brochures on how to get help.

But along with her patients, Dr. Cash, who runs Internet/Computer Addiction Services here in the city that is home to Microsoft, is a pioneer in a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery. The patients, including Mike, 34, are what Dr. Cash and other mental health professionals call onlineaholics. They even have a diagnosis: Internet addiction disorder.

These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction, and one academic expert called it a fad illness.

Skeptics argue that even obsessive Internet use does not exact the same toll on health or family life as conventionally recognized addictions. But, mental health professionals who support the diagnosis of Internet addiction say, a majority of obsessive users are online to further addictions to gambling or pornography or have become much more dependent on those vices because of their prevalence on the Internet.

But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.

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Information Without End

The volume of new knowledge published in every field is enormous and exceeds anyone's ability to keep pace. Everyone today fears that they are under-informed.
* In its 50th year, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. added more than 950,000 items to its collections!
* Even the English language keeps expanding. Since 1966, the English language has gained more than 66,000 words -- equal to half or more of most other languages.

Multitasking and Your Brain

“There’s substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn’t … what’s really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing,” concludes Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Awareness of What?

Kim Strassel, writing in the the Wall Street Journal a few years back pointed out the fallacy of too many days and dates to keep in mind:

Chase Annual Events contains more than 12,000 entries and is more than 700 pages long. The book allows any sponsor of an event to send in an item and will publish it free of charge, though it limits entries to those that are of national or broadly regional interest or that seem to have some special entertainment value.

Last month, we find Listen to Your Inner Critic Month, Freedom From Bullies at Work Week, Create a Great Funeral Day, National Be Bald and Be Free Day, National Sarcastics Month and National She Loves God Week.

Awareness campaigns have become so commonplace these days that even presidents throw them about willy-nilly. Chase's shows dozens of presidential proclamations in 2000, ranging from National Safe Boating Week to Spirit of the ADA Month (celebrating the American With Disabilities Act) to National Day of Concern About Young People and Gun Violence.

The result of awareness-day fatigue is that some of the more serious groups -- those that had previously accomplished some charitable good with awareness days -- have thought about getting out.

It's All a Blur

Do you remember what year these major events occurred?

* Active American military involvement in Vietnam ended?
* The U.S.A. first put a man on the moon?
* The Three Mile Island mishap occurred?

Active American military involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975.
The U.S.A. first put a man on the moon in 1969.
The Three Mile Island mishap occurred in 1979.

As I explain in Breathing Space: Living & Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, not knowing these dates doesn't mean you're not educated. Actually, it's the opposite. In a sense, you're over-educated. You know more about current affairs than most people of any previous generation. To keep events in context, you have to:

* Recognize that you can't keep up with everything. Be more conscious of where you'll offer your time and attention.

* Look for broad-based patterns to the information you receive, rather than attempt to pay attention to all manner of detail.

* Don't beat yourself up psychologically for not keeping up with every little thing. No one can, and unless you're employed by the media, there is no prize for trying.

It's official: Polls are Bogus

In his illuminating book. The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls
David W. Moore, who has been praised as a "scholarly crusader" by the New York Times, reveals that "pollsters don't report public opinion, they manufacture it."

"Drawing on over a decade's experience at the Gallup Poll and a distinguished academic career in survey research, Moore describes the questionable tactics pollsters use to create poll-driven news stories-including force-feeding respondents, slanting question wording, and ignoring public ignorance on even the most arcane issues. More than proof that the numbers do lie, The
Opinion Makers clearly and convincingly spells out how urgent it is that we make polls deliver on their promise to monitor, not manipulate, the pulse of democracy.

What's worse, says the author, today's polls "report the whims rather than the will of the people due to an intrinsic methodological problem: poll results don't differentiate between those who express deeply held views and those who have hardly, if at all, thought about an issue. Thus, respondents are compelled to provide an ill-considered, top-of-mind response because the method does not offer the option of expressing no opinion."

Moore says that forced-choice polls not only distort public opinion, they create a legitimacy spin cycle, which damages U.S. democracy...