Students battled extreme anxiety, fidgeting, loneliness and isolation — all symptoms of withdrawal — during a recent university study, but they weren’t experiencing a day without drugs. Instead, they were asked to give up social media.
For one day, journalism professor Susan Moeller asked the 200 students in her JOUR175: Media Literacy class to avoid media: phones, television, computers and the Internet. Moeller, director of the university’s International Center for Media and the Public Agenda, said she was shocked to find the extreme reaction of her students, who reported adverse mental and physical symptoms. The study found students were “functionally unable” to go without media.
“We were blown away by the answers, just blown away,” Moeller said. “There were certain things we expected. We expected they would immediately say they were addicted to the media in the casual way you say you’re addicted to say chocolate, and then we got the results back not only using the word addicting but also words like withdrawal, craving and the physical and mental responses that they talked about, like getting headaches, depressed, feeling lonely and miserable.”
But members of the students’ generation said they weren’t nearly as surprised by the study’s results.
“I feel like these findings were so obvious because this is what we grew up with, this is the only kind of real communication and lifestyle we know,” junior criminology and criminal justice major Lauren Tafoya said. “I feel that any student could have easily predicted the findings of this study.”
Tafoya said one of her friends participated in the study and lied about completing all 24 hours because it was “just too hard.”
Addiction and reliance on social media is growing, not just at this university but across the world, as the first generation to have grown up in the modern technological age reaches its teens and 20s, said Anna DiNoto, a clinical psychology doctorate intern at the reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program.
In South Korea, more than 90 percent of homes have broadband connections, and 2 million citizens have been identified as Internet addicts, according to the Associated Press.
In the United States, clinics like reSTART are beginning to pop up to combat Internet addiction.
DiNoto said this generation’s reliance on social media is different than previous ones.
“It’s completely different from what [older adults] grew up with, if you take away anything someone uses on a daily basis of course they will feel anxious and overwhelmed,” DiNoto said. “Some of our clients do report anxiety. We’re so reliant on Internet and having instant gratification it’s troubling.”
But DiNoto warned there is a difference between “addiction” and a reliance on a luxury used every day.
Students in the study indicated they felt more than just a reliance on media. Many reported feeling despair, as if they were alone and disconnected from their friends and family.
“Texting and [instant messaging] my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” one student wrote as part of a class assignment after the study. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”
Sophomore journalism major Hilary Weissman said the reliance on social media to maintain friendships is a big problem.
“People are losing the ability to talk to each other in person anymore, and they become uncomfortable,” Weissman said. “To a certain extent, it takes away the significance of friendship or relationship.”
farrell at umdbk dot com
