Imagine that you move into your new dorm room only to find that your internet connection isn’t working. Do you feel a little frustrated, mildly anxious, or totally panicked?

If you chose Option C, you might just be an internet addict. Don’t laugh—a growing number of doctors believe that internet addiction is a serious problem, one that’s on par with established dependencies like alcoholism and compulsive shopping. There’s even a brand-new internet rehab center in Fall City, Washington called reSTART that aims to cure netheads of their wicked ways in just 45 days by reconnecting them to “the real world.” Ironically, the treatment center is located less than 20 minutes away from Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond.

So far, reSTART has treated a grand total of one patient: 19-year-old Ben Alexander, who says that he used to spend up to 17 hours playing World of Warcraft before he checked in. Ben’s paying a whopping $14,500 for the privilege of participating in rehab activities like “Discovery Quest” and “Weekly Shopping/Planning” (seriously, look at reSTART’s sample daily schedule). That’s more than the price of tuition for PA residents at Penn State’s flagship campus. Read More »

I write the following with the understanding that no matter how annoying Facebook can be, it will never be more annoying than Myspace. (Editor’s Note: I am not so sure…) And I will not stop using Facebook because of these things.

10. People You May Know. Otherwise known as “People that you don’t know well enough to be friends with”, “People who have rejected your friend request”, or “People you hate and would never friend even if their lives somehow depended on you friending them.” Facebook has been around long enough that if you haven’t found your friend yet, and he or she hasn’t found you, then you probably aren’t very good friends to begin with.

9. The Mini-Feed. Because you need constant reminder of the things you’ve recently done or said. Or applications you’ve added. Or songs you’ve listened to. Or things you’ve edited. The mini feed takes up like ¼ of your page (unless you are a dirty application whore: see below) and when you try to delete things, it keeps adding other things from days and weeks ago.

8. The Education and Work box. I say this is annoying, but it’s honestly the first thing I look at on someone else’s page. I do it because I am a masochist and I like to hurt myself by seeing how well these people that I hardly know are doing in places that I would love to move to. Read More »

Video games can be, well, addicting. God knows how many late nights I spent trying get out of that one dungeon, or unlock that one sword, or kept saying to myself, “Just one more level…” Still, I draw my limits on things like World of Warcraft.

In case you aren’t up on the MMORPG (that’s Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game) front, World of Warcraft is the most popular MMO out there, with well over six million – yes, million – players. I know people who are hopelessly addicted, people who have no social life, people who dropped out of school so that they could spend more hours playing Warcraft. So when I read about a married couple of six years that divorced because of this game, I could only say one thing. Read More »