Internet Addiction May Breed Violence, Says New Study
The report, published by the Journal of Adolescent Health (with a disclaimer that the results are not definitive), studied over 9,400 Taiwanese teenagers, ultimately determining that the teens who exhibited signs of Internet addiction more frequently admitted to having hit, shoved, or threatened someone in the past year. So, does this demonstrate that Internet addiction fuels violence in teens? Or, could it be that violent children are more likely to develop an unhealthy Internet habit? We'll leave that up to the reader.
The study does make distinctions between different types of Internet usage and correlating instances of violence. Children who predominantly spend their time online studying and researching are less likely to engage in violence than those who spend the majority of their time chatting, gambling or gaming, in public forums, or on pornography sites. Did they really need to study almost 10,000 kids to figure this out?
The lead researcher of the study, Dr. Chih-Hung Ko, offers some parenting tips, which seem to be common in Internet/gaming-and-violence studies. He suggests that parents and children discuss proper Internet usage and attitudes towards violence.
Oh, to go back to the golden era before computers and games completely warped our society! When even the street gangs were happy and carefree. [From: FOXNews]
Teen Texting Craziness
Syracuse University professor Laurence Thomas made news last year for walking out of the classroom whenever his students disobeyed his "no texting in class" rule. Wouldn't the kind of student who would text in class be happy to have class canceled?
In January, 13-year-old Californian Reina Hardesty sent 14,528 text messages from her cell phone. Fortunately for her daddy, he had her on an unlimited text plan.
Two high school cheerleaders in Seattle were suspended from school in December when school officials found out that they had taken nude pictures of themselves on their cell phones and, mistakenly or not, wound up with them circulating through the football locker room. The girls' parents have filed suit against the school. You'd think they would just let the embarassment die quietly.
In December, while on a class trip (according to an Internet rumor anyway), the above message appeared on 18-year-old Elizabeth Frisinger's phone after mistakenly texting her dad, back home in Cleveland, that she'd just lost her virginity. Whoops!
Outdoing Reina Hardesty, 15-year-old Ohioan Paige Hornev averages 15,000 text messages a month. That comes out to the impressive, or pitiful, average of 500 text messages a day.
Thinking about Emily Jenning's texting abilities just makes our thumbs hurt. The Vancouver, British Columbia teen pumped out an absurd 41,600 text messages in the course of a single month -- we did some quick calculations and that works out to about one text every minute.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
andrew said 3:42PM on 2-25-2009
People that surf all the time are more prone to loose touch with reality (or tangeable things like face to face time w/friends). I think they finally realize this and get frustrated/violent. They are surfing all the time and when they finally look up from their pc the world has passed them by. The worst is when they neglect relationships and all of a sudden realize that they have no physical interactions w/others b/c all they do is sit infront of a monitor.
Surfing too much can be very unhealthy mentally/emotionally.
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