Tweeter madness

“Hello, my name is Dino G., and I am a media addict.”

If certain pundits and experts had it their way, they’d have me and other college students announcing just this at Media Anonymous groups around the world. For you see, today’s youth is addicted to media of all kinds, and it’s destroying lives.

Want proof? In a study released this month by the folks at the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland, a thousand college students at 12 universities across the globe were asked to find a 24-hour period in their schedules during which they pledged to give up media of all kinds. This meant no newspapers or magazines, no music or television, no cell phones or MP3 players, and certainly no internet. Participants were asked not to give up on their media fast if they lapsed and to write down their reactions for researchers to analyze.

The results, as characterized by the ICMPA, were startling. A majority of students outright failed to disconnect for an entire day. Students displayed characteristics similar to those of drug and alcohol addicts. In the words of one U.S. student, “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.” “Media is my drug; without it I was lost,” another from the UK said. “I am an addict. How could I survive 24 hours without it?”

Unplugging from media “ripped back the curtain on their hidden loneliness” for students who “couldn’t imagine how to fill up their empty hours without media,” researchers said. The study concluded that the “depths of the ‘addiction’ that students reported prompted some to confess that they had learned that they needed to curb their media habits. Most students doubted they would have much success.”

That’s right, folks, the science is in. The white coats have concluded from this anecdotal evidence that everyone you know or ever will know at Columbia is a media addict. In fact, because you’re reading this article in a copy of Spec or on its website, you are an addict too.

If you’re reading this article in class, look to the student on your left. Now look to the one on your right. If we’re to believe the ICMPA, all three of you are media addicts.

Please don’t take my glibness too seriously. Non-physical addictions can manifest themselves just as insidiously and viciously as addictions to drugs and alcohol. Shopping addicts and compulsive gamblers have their own support groups. Certainly those with similar addictions to, say, IMing or tweeting must exist, and perhaps it’s time for technological over-dependency to be officially accepted and treated. Internet addiction, after all, is not yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a disorder, though online initialisms like LOL and OMG have made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the way the ICMPA describes today’s batch of college students comes off like those overzealous arguments your great-aunt makes about all the sexting teens are doing. Like a previous generation’s lecturing about “reefer madness,” the newest technologies, in particular social-networking sites and text-messaging services, are demonized by the ICMPA and others as the cause of depression, laziness, and general misanthropy among college students.

What these critics fail to realize is that using these modes of communication has been become nearly essential to being a social creature for the 21st century college student. Is it surprising that students admit to feelings of isolation and loneliness when unplugged from email or texting? Of course it’s not—these technologies were designed for social interaction and sweeping analogies to substance addictions are inappropriate. Would we call a daily newspaper reader an addict? Or someone who calls close family members every day a phone junkie?

For most college students, including those at Columbia, checking or responding to an email thread is not part of some perverse epidemic dependency. They’re simply the new ways of communicating that are sometimes viewed scornfully by older folks who don’t fully understand them.

We kids are alright. We’re not sick. We’re social.

Oh, I should tweet that.

Dino Grandoni is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics-political science. He is a former Spectator head copy editor. The Lowest Common Dino-minator runs alternate Fridays.