If you function in the digital world, using internet-enabled computers and always-on mobile connections to work, play, or simply stay in touch, then you may be at risk of a potentially lethal condition. Before you begin to think that a cynical scare monger has taken over Contemporary Issues, ponder the curious case of Kim Jae-beom and his wife, Kim Yun-jeong. Both avid internet aficionados, they somehow found time to make a baby, a beautiful girl they called Kim Sa-rang (meaning "love" in Korean).
But this couple were so taken in by their compulsive internet gaming sessions that they neglected their only daughter (putting her to bed while they went out for ten-hour long all-night sessions at an internet cafe), to the point that the poor baby died of malnutrition, aged only three months. The absolutely devastating paradox of the story is that this couple was apparently addicted to "Prius Online" a game in which players "raise an online girl who gains magic powers as she is nurtured and grows older". The Korean couples case may be an extreme one. And most likely, you can correctly point to millions of positive examples of the life changing impacts which has resulted from long hours on the web, but that is not the focus of this piece.
The point is that increasingly, our lives are being taken over by screens. Service providers and content aggregators have built compelling business cases on our being increasingly addicted to their products, and therefore daily introduce more ways to secure our loyalty, feed our addiction and keep us enthralled. Granted that relatively high bandwidth costs in Nigeria makes us less of victims, the level of the problem is still worrisome, especially when we note projections that the average cost of internet connections would very likely fall to less than 10% of current costs in about a years time. Lower internet costs will surely guarantee that more are afflicted with the virus than is the current case, which is why we should be on watch.
The code is deceptively simple. Whether it is research, information gathering, friend surfing, location finding, or whatever, just get connected. If your office has issued you with a Blackberry, it is to ensure that you work for twenty-four hours, not the eight hours that they pay you for! That insufferable device is guaranteed to keep you occupied at all times of the day, impulsively reaching for your "BB" and going to work at the slightest beep.
As a few credible research works have shown, BB users risk being antisocial, as they would mechanically tap away on their devises at the most inauspicious moments when their undivided attention is more required during meetings, during lectures, during playtime with their children, even during pillow-talk with their spouses and during Khutbah on Jummah! It is an addiction, no less. Unlike the Korean couple, we may not be committing infanticide with our addiction to internet devices, we are certainly nurturing artificial lives while killing relationships that are supposed to be our mainstay.
The increasingly easy access to internet connections and the pervasiveness of mobile broadband ought to help us to create and nurture better lives. But when you consider the almost religious fervor with which aficionados follow friends on Twitter, post on chatrooms, or update profiles on Facebook (and the many other social networking sites which are gradually taking away the need for normal relationships), you begin to get a glimpse of the problem, particularly amongst the youth. Apart from the obvious addiction to social networking sites and Blackberry devices, netaddiction.com (!) identifies other strains of the virus to include addiction to cybersex/cyberporn, fixation with online affairs, online gambling/gaming, and addiction to virtual worlds, in all categories of which the youth are the largest group of victims.
Addiction is easy to form, mainly because these days, the internet is the first (and for most, the last) source of research on practically any subject. The "google effect" is so pervasive that a particular telecommunications network in Nigeria now offers you the chance to search on Google without even going online. All you need to do is to send your question to a short code by SMS, and you get a response in a matter of seconds. Any subject ranging from the local governments in Katsina state to the soil density of the moons surface is covered on the internet. You no longer have to depend on your teacher to explain to you "the impact of autocidal infusion on ant colonies".
You dont even need to go to an Imam to ask questions about your deen, its all on the internet. But, really? In addition to dysfunctional family relationships that it encourages, net addiction has the additional effect of imbuing sufferers with an obviously over exaggerated opinion of their capabilities: students have no regard for their teachers because theyve spent hours on the .internet gathering rubbish they believe equates all the knowledge teachers can offer. Real scholars no longer get any respect, and pretenders now claim scholarship just because they believe that all the knowledge they need is on the internet! That is what addiction does to you. They say that a problem identified is a problem half-solved. If you are a denier, you dont need to read any further.
But for those who are in genuine doubt as to whether long hours on the net may be having potentially damaging impacts on their social lives and who are determined to control the course of their own lives (while fulfilling the rights of their families, their spouses and the others whom the Prophet (sallalalhu alayhi wa salam) said we should preserve their rights upon us), start by doing a personal audit. If you frequently stay on-line longer than you intended or if you often feel depressed or nervous when off-line, then seek help. If you find yourself spending more time on-line and you prefer that over being with real people, or if you find that it is easier to form on-line relationship than with people around you, you are at risk.
These and many other indicators of antisocial behavior means that you have been overusing the internet. For the avoidance of doubt, it can hardly be argued that the internet is one of the most fundamental life changing tools to emerge in decades, if not centuries past. But .the lesson often lost on many, is that it is a mere tool, and the quality of its output is only as good as the person using the tool, the input determines the output. The internet is a source of knowledge, but not the only one, and absolutely not necessarily a source of true knowledge; it is a source of information, but not necessarily of correct information; it can make life easier, but is not necessarily a source of right living. It all depends on where you go, when you do, and more importantly it depends on who is taking you!
This article was culled from the publications of Deen Communication Limited