Topic: Addiction

There may be only 39 working days until I deliver the Untangling the Web book manuscript, but I’m still looking for contributions, stories, links and ideas on a few topics to produce the five exclusive chapters that will join the extended Untangling the Web columns

This week, I’m looking at addiction - one of the many evils levelled against the Web. To what extent can people become hooked on this technology, and is there something about it that makes it more or less compelling than other media?

Internet Addiction Clinics have opened up around the world - including one in the UK - and there is some evidence in the literature that the interactivity of the experience can draw us in, suggesting that different parts of our neuroanatomy is activated in the brains of “addicts” than “non-addicts”. 

And it’s not just games that have proven “addictive”, although those are the regularly-cited culprits. The terrible tragedy of the Facebook Mom (used as a case study out every time there’s a story on this, like the one in The Independent a couple of weeks ago) highlights that the rest of the web is a potentially dangerous place to be.

But how much of this is unfounded, and what is the real evidence? Send your comments to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk, or tweet me @aleksk.