I learned a new acronym this week: CCU. Minding my own business one morning in a hotel room in Virginia I found, on nationwide television, a heavyweight panel debating war on Iran, Hillary Clinton’s plans for healthcare, and, with equal force, Compulsive Computer Use.
From the revered American Medical Association (AMA), president Ron Davis insists that CCU can lead to trouble with “your family, your community, your cohort”. Sufferers forget about real life because they are so busy working or playing in the virtual world, he says.
Then veteran talk show host John McLaughlin goes further. He says that while many Americans “obsess” over computer gambling and games, many are also “addicted to instant messaging, text messaging and email. As a result, health is ignored, families disintegrate, and jobs are lost”.
That’s the first time I’ve heard IT fingered for job losses for a reason other than its automation of labour processes. But it seems I’m behind the times in not being alert to the damaging consequences of IT addiction.
Though the US Recognizing Addiction as a Disease Act 2007 only deals with drug abuse, McLaughlin asks: why not include computer addiction as well? Symptoms, he adds, include inability to limit time spent on a computer, lying about that time spent, and isolation both social and mental.
Thankfully, commentators from Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune demur, daringly contending that it’s fine for airlines, for example, to direct people to web sites to buy their tickets. Also, the American Medical Association itself has backed off from classifying computer games as addictive, preferring to talk about internet and video game “overuse”.
Yet I don’t believe we can ever relax in our ridiculing of those who fret about IT addicts. After all, the human race is supposed to be addicted to oil (George W Bush, no less), sex, gambling, over-eating, alcohol, shopping and consumer goods in general. The one addiction people never question, however, is that of “experts” to the ubiquitous metaphor of… addiction.
We’ve not heard the last of CCU. The reason: in our misanthropic age, the real and popular target of criticism is not computers, but their users. Instead of upholding how autonomous adults have, through free will, given the world the wonderful tool of IT, we’re force-fed a nightmare in which a nation of saps inevitably falls victim to an anorak version of cheap thrills. It’s human nature, innit?
Well, no. That view is much more disempowering than any long spell at a keyboard.
