In South Korea, a rehab camp for Internet-addicted teenagers | Hacker News Reader

In South Korea, a rehab camp for Internet-addicted teenagers

washingtonpost.com

26 pointslnguyen8 comments

It is great that they are recognizing this for the issue it is. Because technology is an inevitable part of most of our lives going cold turkey won't work. How do they deal with that?

The South Korean approach is far from rational in these matters though, I'd imagine stuff like this causes significantly more harm to these kids than their supposed "addiction".

I doubt what they are doing is causing more harm than opportunity cost. The things they mentioned help in the short term. While internet addiction is still in contention there already are empirically tested treatments that can do a lot better than what they talked about in the article.

But the real goal isn't preventing internet addiction, this is just a part of the campaign to control internet in South Korea to shape political opinion.

Read up on KSCS and the internet censorship there.

Yea, South Korea's control of the internet seems almost dystopian at times.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/south-korea-only-thing... There are more articles on the eff about it.

Wow, TIL. I knew South Korea had some internet censorship, but it definitely is a lot higher than I thought. That changes the context of the article a lot!

This is based on what? Your knowledge of Korea via TV shows?

According to the article it sounds like it's just a camp with no Internet and the kids do other things for fun. The horror!

Why would I make such a statement based on TV shows?

It's no news that South Korea is one of the worst countries on earth regarding internet freedom, probably only behind their northern neighbours.

The gaming thing is just used to push even heavier censorship and controls on the internet.

And yeah, forcing kids to go to a rehab camp because they play too much videogames sounds pretty horrible.

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