Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 1, 1994 TAG: 9404270121
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY TOM STEINERT-THRELKELD DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But, if you're a junkie and your narcotic is hooking into networks of computers, calculating the response isn't that simple.
"That's impossible to answer, since I was going in terms of how many straight days, with a few short breaks to answer the phone, remember to run over to the fridge for food, beverages or whatever," said Georgia Greene, a pseudonym for a computer science major at a California university.
During one three-day run on the Internet, she "couldn't figure out why it kept getting light and dark outside" and "vaguely noticed that the clock wasn't telling the right time at all." She tried to rest for a few days - but wound up lying around with a laptop computer. So she forgot to eat and sleep again.
After getting so weak she felt sick for three weeks, she tried to recuperate from her non-stop involvement in discussion groups and electronic mail by taking a vacation. But only an absence of computer rental stores kept her away from a keyboard and modem. "Some hick town," she complained.
Such is life when you're an on-line addict. With as many as 20 million computer users now tapping into the Internet and another 5 million using commercial services such as America Online or CompuServe, it's not surprising to find that some are becoming so enthralled by contacts they can make, information they can retrieve and roles they can play in surreal games that they find it hard to quit.
Just how big a population of on-line addicts live inside the borders of cyberspace is not known. "I don't know of anybody that knows enough to say anything definitive," said Richard H. Cutler, an assistant professor at Fordham University who interviews scores of addicts and other network users for studies he conducts about the effect of technology on individuality.
For one thing, leaving the "real" world and immersing oneself in a computer network has some of the same stigma as losing oneself in alcohol or drugs. Few people with the addiction want to talk about it in public, said Cutler. Greene, for instance, agreed to talk openly only if her real name was not used in print. She didn't want friends in Dallas to realize the extent of her addiction. That's a normal request, Cutler said.
But the phenomenon has spread widely enough that computer librarian Billy Barron, an occasional binger himself, has attempted to break down case histories into types. The University of Texas at Dallas network services manager says the addicts fall into one of six categories:
On-line game players. These addicts are the same as any other video game addict, only they have transferred their attention from Nintendo and Sega home games or arcade games to multiplayer dungeons and other adventures that require networks to play out their "shared hallucinations."
Chatters. This is the electronic equivalent of the endless gossip, the type of person, like Greene, who "just talks all the time" by typing to Citizens Band-like chat services, electronic mail, bulletin boards, discussion groups and computer conferences.
Mass downloaders. This is the person who finds the Net to be almost like a candy store and can never get enough free documents, photo files or software from its vast expanse. Besides waiting for NASA weather maps or pictures of supermodels to move down wires to a chosen computer, this net nut spends a lot of time tweaking systems to speed up "transfer times."
Bookworms. Similar to the paper type. Can't stop reading network news, electronic magazines and topical mailing lists. Not unusual for such a reader to have 500 or more dispatches in a personal mailbox waiting to be read.
The cracker. Once called a hacker, the outlaw who lives to find and possibly exploit holes in network security.
The explorer. The James Kirk type, who finds the on-line world to be a personal frontier. Always new planets in cyberspace to find and examine.
Three hundred hours a month - 10 hours a day on-line - can be a typical explorer's search time, when hourly charges are not involved, said P. Russell Williams Jr., general manager of Delphi Internet Services Corp.
While exploring, they can change identities, try out personalities and even create new societies. The multiuser games often are as much about creating new social contracts and places where people can live by their own rules as about entertainment, said Cutler.
Particularly teen-agers and young adults, he said, "would much rather spend time constructing their own real world." But only later do they realize the repercussions.
For Greene, it was physical illness. For adults, it can be lost productivity on the job. For students, it can be failing grades.
"It's almost predictable that a student that spends a lot of time in multiuser domains is a student on probation," the Fordham instructor said.
There's a need for a 12-step group to help on-line addicts, like Alcoholics Anonymous helps drinkers, suggests Louella V. Wetherbee, a founder of an Internet consulting firm called NeTTexas Inc.
"Oh, I don't know," said Steve Krucyznyski, a 39-year-old lawyer in Boston who has been known to fall asleep at his keyboard. "I guess we're all in denial. There's also no known cure."
by CNB