Hello there. My name is Jessica, and I am afflicted with IAD. It’s a chronic disorder, which causes me to stay up to unmentionable hours of the night, and keeps me indoors for good portions of the day. It’s not something life-threatening, but has probably killed my social life more than I care to admit. And to tell the truth, it’s not even recognized as a true mental disorder. It’s the Internet addiction disorder, and I’ve got it bad.
I think my addiction started when I was in around the fourth grade, when my friends and I were possessed with the website Neopets and I suddenly had to be online at all hours to play with my internet pets and gain nonexistent money. Previously, I had an email address which I would check daily, but it wasn’t until Neopets that I felt a compulsion to stay online. It slowly escalated as I grew older, from looking at interesting blogs, to getting a blog myself and updating it regularly. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have kept me glued to my laptop day after day, and I just can’t help but compulsively check for updates when the internet is in reach. Hours of my day are spent checking the same websites over and over again, just because there may or may not be something new.
The art form of the internet is that it’s a completely open expression of your imagination. Have a story or plotline that just won’t get out of your mind? Join NaNoWriMo every November and there’s a whole community to support you in writing a novel in a month. Want to play games with people half a world away? Go play some Starcraft or Runescape and go on an adventure. My current addiction is Tumblr, a micro-blogging site that lets me post and reblog pictures till my heart is content. Some days, I just feel like editing pictures in Photoshop to see what I get. And by posting them on Tumblr, I get pretty instantaneous feedback. Due to the site’s easy design, it’s constantly being updated, and I feel the need to see what’s new, all day, every day.
Because of my internet addiction, I think I’ve changed my way with words, most of all. Suddenly, stories that could have taken me five minutes to tell are shortened to 140 characters or less for Twitter. On Tumblr, you can tag your posts to describe them. I’ve caught myself thinking in Tumblr tags more than once while drifting into daydreams. The world as I know it has been altered into ways I can tell my blog’s audience what’s going on, while also keeping it relevant to their interests. There are times when I wonder what my internet friends are doing or how their days are going, just because they’re my friends. Even though I haven’t met most of them in person, they still know what’s going through my head at any given point in the day because of social networking websites, which is a lot more than can be said of some of my school friends.
Some days, I wish there were an easy cure to my IAD. I wish I could be a more socially acceptable member of society. I wish the people who I’m closest to were more tangible, and I seriously wish that I could stop thinking in Twitter hashtags. But at the end of the long night, refreshing different websites, the internet makes up a huge part of me and my life. It’s the way that I get my information, and a way for me to express my creativity back to the world. It’s an outlet for my thoughts and feelings, and allows me to apply the art to my every day life.
Hi Jessica, I hope you read Luis's very similar piece about his migration into the Internets. You two could form a support group or something. You ramble a little about Tumblr, but this is informative and does really foreground the big picture issues I asked for this week. I find myself wanting to know, though, not just -that- you think in hashtags but also what that is like.
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