My Son Andrew is a second Life addict. His internet addiction started with well intentioned introductions to new technology by those who thought they were doing him a favor. It is not the case.
Second Life is an online community where people who have enablers willing to give them money and a means to maintain their basic biological functions, to escape into a fantasy world they create. Real life is hard. People who want to dodge the discomfort associated with maturing into responsible,productive citizens will escape into second life just as a heroin addict escapes into a fantasy world via injection.
Second Life junkies will become combative and argumentative when confronted just as an alcoholic or drug user becomes combative. It has cost me a son. I guess I am a bad father. I believed that he could control his usage and time on it. He spends 12 hours a day on Second Life and has Second Life friends contacting him via cell phone so he can participate even when he is absent from his home computer.
They say alcoholics and drug abusers need to hit rock bottom before they decide to pull themselves out. My greatest fear is that my son has a network of enablers that will never allow "rock bottom" to happen. They will give him a place to stay and money for food( or maybe even free food and board and transportation) and will not require anything from him. One of his friends parents regularly allows their unemployed and drug abusing son to have friends live at their house when the kids don't want to follow rules in the family.
I hope and pray my own family will not do the same. By giving him the means to survive without discomfort will allow him to continue his addiction unabated. Our son does not need a new place to live. He has a home with us. He chose to leave because of our,his parents, desire for him to separate himself from his second life addiction and interact with the real world. Rejoining the real world was something he was not going to do willingly. If we were going to force him to do it he said he was going to leave. Something he did last night.
I hope he will come to his senses. I hope that sleeping on a couch at a friends house will make him uncomfortable enough to change his behaivor. I hope that if he goes to familiy members for comfort they will respect our wishes and send him home where he can get the love and care he needs. I hope he will grow into a fine man. Until he overcomes this addiction, he will forever remain a stunted individual wasting his opportunities and his future.
This is a cautionary tale and is true. Computers should not be in children's bedrooms and their time should be limited. The internet addiction breeds sociopathic behavior in my opinion. We need to act now or their may not be a generation left to save.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
We all may be living in a purely or mostly electronic environment soon, perhaps even within the next 100 years achieving a posthuman condition. The internet is not evil, and spending a majority of one's day on it does not necessarily indicate addiction. I think that the qualifying point in this is if a person can actually support themselves through their time spent. I agree that if the time expenditure is purely leisure with absolutely no return, that is 'bad'; However, if one can manage to support themselves, or even profit through such endeavors (and there have been several notable people, mostly through virtual realestate(to specify in SL)) it's as legitimate as a life spent toiling away in the office, the friends as legitimate as those met in the bar after work.
ReplyDeleteWhat I fear is that people would reject even this, calling it an atrocity, and lending further to the stigma it already has.
My point is, I suppose, instead of forcing your son away from Second Life, encourage him to find a way to use it to support himself, and make his life fulfilling. Treating it as something to be cut out of his life will only serve to alienate him, and put you further and further away from where he wants to be. Work -with- him to find and research these things. Show him how he can supplement his passion with college classes in graphic design and programming (both highly relevant in the SL 'verse).
I wish you the best of luck reconnecting with your son, and showing him that SL and the internet is just a stepping stone to grander dreams.
(on a side note, I've developed a creeping hatred of this comment box and its limitations)