Press, Includes bibliographical references and index. CapitalismβPsychological aspects. Psychology, Pathological. C DDC For Shelby Miller, to whom nothing in this book applies, and for John Burnham, to whom everything applies, and who would have appreciated the joke. Dur- ing the talk I had casually mentioned internet addiction. Berg told me that I had spoken a truth larger than I knew. Many of his male friends at Stockholm University had dropped out of school and were living in crash pads, compulsively playing World of Warcraft.
They spoke an argot more English than Swedish. It was all raiding, all the time. This sort of behavior does seem like an addiction, in the sense of a com- pulsive, regret- lled pursuit of transient pleasures that are harmful to both the individual and society. For gaming, the personal cost was highest for Swedish men. Back home in Florida I noticed digital distractions exacting a more impartial academic toll.
The smartphones that dotted the lecture halls were as often wielded by women as by men. One admitted that he had lost a year to compulsive gaming. He said that he was in recoveryβ precariously, to judge by his grades. Another student knew gamers who. The can by the computer became for me a symbol of the shifting mean- ing of addiction. As late as the s the word seldom referred to anything other than compulsive drug use. Over the next forty years, however, the concept of addiction broadened.
Memoirists confessed to addictions to gambling, sex, shopping, and carbs. A nineteen-year-old truant in Jiangsu Province made the news when he hacked o his left hand to cure his internet addiction.
Chinese o cials judged as many as 14 percent of his peers to be similarly hooked, and set up internet addiction rehabilitation camps. South Korea and Japan followed suit. Only the last habit failed to appeal to Americans, 47 percent of whom showed signs of at least one behavioral or substance addiction disorder in any given year in the early s.
