Aabderoog

Internet Addiction Disorder is NOT a category of mental disorder according to the DSM-IV-TR.

Some people believe it should be taken up into the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due to the fact that South Koreans have begun to commit crimes related to excessive internet use and Gaming.

However, from the perspective of your COM3704 course in communication studies, your lecturer Dr Mbatha wanted you to think about what happens with regard to communicating in a family context when a member of the family is constantly involved with the internet.

From your perspective as a student I can understand your concern with questioning the term advantages in conjunction with a condition that others have pathologised by calling it a disorder.

Since it is NOT a disorder, there are advantages to the kind of behavior that individuals exhibit who engage in (what some ‘outsiders’ see as) excessive internet use.

The fact that disorders are value judgments by some individuals (Psychologists and Psychiatrists) who compare the said behaviour with that of the general population’s behaviour becomes more and more problematic in our current time. Since the electronic age has facilitated the development of electronic gadgets and thereby connected us all through the internet, planet earth has shrunk to the size of a village (the so called global village). Our parents and grandparents have never known such openness and sharing of even private information, at the speed of lightning throughout the world, and they may be quick to judge behavior related to learning how to negotiate new gadgets as obsessive-compulsive, asocial, addictive and excessive. It is very difficult for those people who never knew/experienced electronic connectedness, to understand that internet use needs to be practiced, just like everything else needs to be practiced in order to learn it well.

Communities on this earth that have never gone to school, think that...