Sometime in year 2005, China has taken a move to shake off internet addiction from an estimate number of 2.5 million net addicts (which has now probably escalated) and some patients willingly submitted themselves for treatment while others still have to be pulled in by their worried parents.
Various examination/rehabilitation procedures would be implemented such as electric shock treatment, therapy sessions, exercises and other sort of proverbial medication. Now it doesn’t sound too scary to be in a rehab, is it? We all know that the amount you’d spend to cure any kind of illness is more expensive than the few bucks you pay for playing online games in internet cafes everyday. And with that money to bring you back to normal, you either do two things once you get released: 1)Resist the temptation 2)If you can’t, you have to earn more money to finance your trip to the rehab again.
Now, after reading an article about a man from Guangzhou, China, who died after 3 days of staying in an internet cafe (of course he could be playing games, chatting, surfing the net but NOT just checking out on people who come in and out of the shop),it made me think that internet addiction in Chinese people might be getting worse than we thought. Authorities ruled out suicide as the cause of death and believed that the man is positive of exhaustion. In China, where people are more exposed to latest technology and online games more than any of the average teens across the globe (mostly because it came from them) it would be tough to fight against, well, techy addiction. Well, of course it’s not just the Chinese who suffer from this, in the same year the Internet Addiction Treatment in Beijing was established, a 28-year-old Korean died of heart failure due to acquired exhaustion exactly after 3 days of online gaming marathon.
We sure hope that the order issued to limit the time users spend online and ban new opening of cybercafes in China this year would help decrease the possibility of more deaths caused by the Internet - which now gets blamed for instead of being thanked for the content and information we can all make use of.
