Guest Lecture on Internet Addiction

To help us better understand internet addiction, treated in our Paul Virilio text, Information Bomb, we have as a guest speaker in this coming Wednesday's lecture WHO researcher Dr. Bruce Alexander -- one of the world's leading scholarly authorities on addiction. Dr. Alexander's recent study for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, The Roots of Addiction in Free Market Society, is available online in portable document format. You can read about him in Britain's Daily Telegraph and Guardian. Now a book, published this month at Oxford UP, the argument has Dr. Alexander in high international media demand....

The talk, which begins at 12:30 in WMC3515, is open to friends & colleagues in the Department.

Update: from today's canada.com, headline "Disconnect Anxiety: ....59% of Canadians feel anxious without the [Inter]Net."

'Internet addiction" and "CrackBerry" are the narcotic-laced phrases we invariably use to explain our growing dependence on laptops and PDAs. Now a Canadian media research company has examined what happens to users in the absence of their virtual communication of choice and coined a term for the modern-day affliction: "disconnect anxiety."
The syndrome is described, in a study that will be released today, as the various feelings of disorientation and nervousness experienced when a person is deprived of Internet or wireless access.