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| Why is the Internet so Addictive? |  This issue has been troubling the scientists all around the world. As well, the research is exploratory at this time, that’s why suppositions such as why is the Internet so addictive are no further than guesses. In view of the fact that other researchers online have made their guesses known you can get acquainted with one more opinion that exists among us.
From the time when the aspects of the Internet where people are spending the greatest amount of time online have to do with social interactions, it would come into view that socialization is what makes the Internet so addicting. Just so – simple old hanging out with other people and talking with them. In actual fact it doesn’t matter whether it’s via e-mail, a discussion forum, chat, or a game online (such as a MUD), simply people are spending this time exchanging information, support, and chit-chat with other people like themselves.
Would we ever describe any time spent in the real world with friends as addicting? Of course not. Remember teenagers talk on the phone for hours on end, with people they see each day. We don’t say they are addicted to the telephone. What about people that lose hours at a time, dipped into a book, forgetting about friends and family, and often not even picking up the phone when it rings. We don’t say that they are addicted to the book. If some clinicians and researchers are now going to start defining addiction as social interactions, then every real-world social relationship I have is an addictive one.
Socializing – talking – is a very addictive behavior, if one applies the same criteria to it as researchers looking at Internet addiction do. Does the fact that we are now socializing with the help of some technology (can you say, "telephone"?) change the basic process of socialization? Perhaps, a little. But not so radically as to deserve a disorder. Checking e-mail, as Greenfield claims, in actual fact is not the same as pulling a slot-machine’s handle. One is social seeking behavior, the other is reward seeking behavior. They are two very different things, as any behaviorist will tell you. It’s too bad the scientists can’t make this differentiation, as it shows a considerable lack of realizing of basic behavioral hypothesis.
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