Internet use reduces study skills in university students
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
This would be expected of any addiction, and so they had to jazz up the title.
But that's true of any addiction - alcohol, drug, gambling, etc. You can see the effects before it reaches the extreme stage.
I'm just saying the title isn't completely click-baity.
You can see the bad effects on people on their way to extreme addiction. There is a difference between that and the vast majority of ordinary users of the internet. It's like the difference between someone who plays the lotto once in a while or drinks on special occasions vs people on their way to gambling or alcohol addiction.
> I'm just saying the title isn't completely click-baity.
The title is clickbait. Sciencedaily is well known for doing that as they take science press releases and fluff it up in order to get traffic. I guess in this tough media environment, you can't blame them since everyone clickbaits.
The internet doesn't reduce study skills. Problematic internet use does. So the title is absolutely clickbait since most people who use the internet aren't affected.
But I'm not sure an addiction to reading, or an addiction to painting, would necessarily have the same negative effect. Sure, an obsessive addiction where you can't do anything else, but that isn't what's discussed here.
I'd hypothesise some addictions have a worse effect on study skills than others.
This has the disadvantage that it is near-totally unrelated to what most people think of as "addiction". But it has the advantage that it is a coherent concept, which isn't true of most offered definitions.
In the vernacular, "addiction" just means that you disapprove of someone's behavior.
In medicine outside psychiatry, "addiction" refers to the phenomenon of physical withdrawal symptoms in the absence of something. For no particularly good reason, you are not considered to be addicted to oxygen. But that's not part of the definition, it's an implied codicil.
Psychiatry defines a single "addictive disorder", which is compulsive gambling. Nothing else is considered addictive. This seems to be a response to the fact that no one has ever provided a workable definition of addiction. (See e.g. https://www.porticonetwork.ca/web/fundamentals-addiction-too... : "The term addiction is no longer used to describe substance use disorders. It was felt that the term was so loaded with associations that it lacked precision.") This comic ( http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-03-21 ) provides an amusing illustration of the issues. But for a less irreverent joke at psychiatry's expense, this formal paper ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5328289/ ) spends some time making fun of the fact that compulsive gambling is the unique "addictive disorder" while compulsive stealing, which is mostly identical except in the specific behavior expressed, is an "impulse control disorder".
Here's how the different systems classify caffeine:
Vernacular: addictive if you're a Mormon; not otherwise.
Economics: not addictive; no increasing returns.
Medicine: addictive. (Withdrawal causes severe headaches.)
Psychiatry: not a substance use disorder. (Consumption of caffeine may be compulsive, but it is not a "disorder", itself not a well-defined term.)
I suggest to you that the definition you provided, "a behavior that impairs other aspects of your life to a large degree", comes from psychiatry, but is actually part of the definition of a "disorder", not an "addiction".
That aside, I'd like to congratulate you on how non-confrontational your comment was, making it easier for me to reply that you've taught me something. I will try to emulate that in my comments in the future.
Addiction Medicine (ADM) is a recognized physician subspecialty of the American Board of Medical Specialties. [1]
Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences. [2]
Dependence or physical dependence is used in the psychopharmacological context in a narrower sense, referring solely to the development of withdrawal symptoms on cessation of drug use. [3]
[1] https://www.drugabuse.gov/nidamed-medical-health-professiona...
[2] https://www.asam.org/resources/definition-of-addiction
[3] https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/terminology/definition1/...
A good psychiatrist uses the ICD and DSM as a guide and not as a rule. The two key factors that contribute to a gaming disorder, according to ICD-11 are:
1. increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities; and
2. continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences. The behaviour pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
This can be applied to many things reasonably. Each is not going to get its own category as an addictive disorder. A good psychiatrist would, however, still be able to identify that there may be a problem if these two conditions are met for a different activity.
If I'm addictive to romance novels at the expense of my studies I think it would have the same negative effect.
Or perhaps increased internet usage is an effect, not the cause?
I personally think that it's feedback loop of some sort, but not at all scientific to say that one causes the other when all we have from the study is correlation.
> In addition to the links between levels of internet addiction and poor study motivation and ability, internet addiction was found to be associated with increased loneliness. The results indicated that loneliness, in turn, made studying harder for the students.
While they don't use the phrase "causes", the in turn definitely suggests that they think internet addiction causes loneliness. Since we're apparently free to interpret correlation as causation, here's my interpretation:
Loneliness makes studying harder and is major contributing factor in internet addiction.
Even in the 90's and 00's I saw a decline in technical areas of study, but there was a time when this was the standard (and arguably only) way to get through your program (think Law or Business school in the 70's - 80's). There was just too much material to distill down for a single person. I wonder if this form of knowledge acquisition is largely dead...
That's a very different conclusion from "Internet use reduces study skills in university students"
Too bad that they didn't collect grades and test results and measure actual academic performance.
Let me put it this way: Third world country, absolutely useless professors who are in the job because it simply pays (even random marks), and no actual technical skills to be learned.
If it wasn't for using the internet, I probably wouldn't have succeeded in university nor found a job.
The study only investigates problematic internet use and it was conducted in Italy though. So yes, that generalized title statement is bullshit.
I think you've have failed to grasp the issue.
Nobody doubts the internet as a transformational vehicle for information propagation.
The study attempts to show that constant internet use can demotivate people in study.
I believe it's true, because constant internet use makes it hard to concentrate for long periods: I find it much harder to simply 'read a book' these days, but that's just me.