Researchers "Addicted" to Bogus Internet Studies

Money quote from the study being ridiculed here:

Students "could live without their TVs and the newspaper, but they can’t survive without their iPods." (from http://withoutmedia.wordpress.com/)

Are students wiring up their iPods to interface with pacemakers? Have their survival skills atrophied so much that the only thing reminding them to eat is the "it is time to eat" track that plays every 8 hours on their iPod? Or could it be that the people who wrote the study carelessly or intentionally exaggerated in their quest for headline-grabbing material?

There's grant money to be had for anything that can be defined as a sufficiently important problem. 'Internet addiction' gets funded in Korea, and we throw fat money at anything which even sounds drug-related.

The increasing ubiquity of digital socialization is interesting of course, but then so is every new thing...TV, rock music, probably radio back in the day.

They may be addicted to the convenience of the gadgets if anything. Nobody rings the doorbell anymore, they stand in front of the door and call you from their cell.