A Deadly Addiction You Never Saw Coming
BBC News reports on the death of a Chinese teen who was beaten to death in a rehab center for internet addicts. Apparently, addiction to the internet is a major concern in China:
China is increasingly taking action against what it sees as a pandemic of web addiction.Some estimates suggest up to 10% of the country's 100 million teenage web users could be addicted, and a growing number of rehabilitation services exist.
However, there is little consensus on how to treat the addiction. In July, China's Ministry of Health formally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment option.
Well, that's good. Yeah, giving shock treatment to 10 million youth who spend too much time online definitely sounds kind of insane. Really, the whole idea of widespread internet addiction sounds pretty ridiculous and I'm inclined to assume it has more to do with a cultural paranoia about computers than an actual epidemic of compulsive web surfers.
But as crazy as all this sounds, it's really not all that different from the way our government deals with marijuana users.
digg
redditThis is just sad
Comment posted by Anonymous on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 5:16amThe cure for internet addiction is meeting a girl, not going to jail.
The worst part of this is
Comment posted by TrebleBass on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 1:05pmThe worst part of this is that the guards (or teachers, or rehab people, or whatever they allegedly are) working there are obviously self-righteous violent people with psychological problems who enjoy more than a little their position of power and their authority to physically and psychologically abuse the "addicts" in the name of saving chinese society from the ills of the internet. Could this possibly have anything to do with the communist party feeling threatened by the internet? Could they be indoctrinating the population to fear the internet so as to progressively have more and more leverage over controlling the internet and persecuting the people who might use it to undermine their power?
10% of all teenagers are
Comment posted by TrebleBass on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 1:11pm10% of all teenagers are addicted? How the hell did they come up with that figure? They probably just made it up to scare the older population and make the teenagers feel guilty to surf the web, and to give themselves the authority to start cramping down on people.
I'm Addicted to Oxygen
Comment posted by Giordano on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 12:54amNot all addictions are bad.
Most everyone on Earth have something in common.
Comment posted by disgruntled veteran on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 12:37amWe all would like to see the violent assholes in charge of governments be removed from power and never be allowed to have any power over anyone ever again.