Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder (1996) [pdf]

"Addiction" is probably not the right way of framing it, since it applies more to the place you live rather than some aspect of your character. The place you live may be car-dependent, if walking/cycling/public transport are not adequate substitutes even temporarily.

Plus more 'normal' people are 'addicts' now. The only people spending tons of time online back in the 90s were weirdos who were REALLY into some aspect of it (for me, it was web design and UI/UX though of course I had no idea there was a term for it). We're not addicted to electricity, but I bet people were side-eyeing the first people who were obsessed enough to learn wiring and hook up their houses themselves.

We also had a similar reaction to television, which followed a similar pattern: My grandfather who was born in the 1910s was a factory worker who was OBSESSED with TVs when they were invented. His basement was full of parts and Franken-TVs. He was an 'addicted weirdo' in the 1930s and 1940s but by the time he died in the 1990s EVERYBODY was spending hours a day in front of a TV.

initially the internet was a bit of an enemy, and turns out they were right eveyone became internet addicted.

Ivan Goldberg was criticizing that in the 90s, by making that joke: look, all the things they take as "symptoms of addiction", if you transfer that to what we, we realize that these need not be symptoms at all - just a form of passionate action in something." And boy, did that backfire.

Psychiatry has a long history of being a structurally conservative field that frames the action of people as "symptomatic" when it irritates existing hegemonic social expectations; there are great texts by Erving Goffman on how psychiatric framing defends our ideas of social normality against disruption, and tends to make it "just an individual disease problem". That completely ignores social change and, more importantly, social power structures in which suffering has much deeper contextual roots than just "this person is sick". (Goffman calls this an "illegitimized state of being "away", as opposed to legitimized ones like praying or working) [0].

Literature in game studies/critical education notes that declaring teenagers "addicted" because they use the little time school and homework leaves them - later at night - to game with friends rather than sleep stigmatizes their free use of time, their social connections outside of school, and their impudence of daring to try to decide over their time themselves rather than just submit to school-ordered ideal time management ideas.[1, but German].

Ivan Goldberg was trying to fight against the internet being stigmatized in the wake of yet another technology panic, and he did it after it was invented. And without intending to, he became the unofficial father of medicalizing it.

[0] Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places. [1] Michael Dellwing, Alessandro Tietz Pathologisierte Sozialität: „Spielsucht“ als institutionelle Verteidigung. In: Dellwing und Harbusch, Pathologisierte Gesellschaft? Weinheim: Beltz.

The US is an outlier, the suicide rate has increased by 10% between 1996 and 2017.

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide

I'm not sure that there is comparable data available for depression since our understanding of it has changed over the last 30 years and getting consistent data is very difficult.

There's always some reason to criticize other's behavior as bad, for them or society or whatever. There's always the problem of "you don't see the value the behavior gives me the same way I do."

Even if the effects are legitimately objectively bad for someone, was the cause really "internet addiction?" Or was that merely a convenient label to apply or even a pet cause that could be furthered by latching on to a new fad? The folks who were worst affected by "internet addiction" in 96 were not likely to have been pursuing wildly different lifestyles without it.

Similarly, the internet has had a lot of externalities we may not have addressed.