Internet Use: College Students and the Online World
Internet usage is increasing rapidly among the general population but even greater among college students, leading to pathological use, or Internet addiction, for some students. Internet addiction is defined as a psychological dependence on the internet and is characterized by; anxiety, depression, emptiness when offline, an increasing tolerance to the effects of being online, and denial of the challenging behaviors (Kandell, 1998). College students are more vulnerable to developing internet addiction than most other segments of society since they were born into the internet generation. In the present paper, the role of college students and their use of the internet are examined. It is hypothesized that college students will have a high dependency for the internet where it gets extreme and falls into the addiction category. The following ten literature reviews attempt to demonstrate and support this hypothesis. In one research study done by Leo Reisberg (2000) internet dependency is described as a problem that affects at least 10 percent of the college students that were examined and surveyed in his study. From 1998-99 1,300 students at seven American institutions and one in Northern Ireland were observed. It was found that at least 10 percent of the college students were on the internet so often that it interfered with their grades, health, and social lives. Students who were characterized as internet-dependent spent an average of 229 minutes a day online for nonacademic reasons. It was learned that 6 percent of all the students spent an average of almost seven hours a day of using the internet. “Grades decline, mostly because attendance declines. Sleep patterns go down. And they become socially isolated” (Reisberg, 2000). It was concluded that college students were using the internet to an extreme, to the point where they missed class and receive low grades because of it. Reisberg saw that the problem of excessive internet use on campuses had grown and since