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Online Anonymous, anyone?

Deepika Davidar

Let's begin with the good news. There's a new cure for mouse potatoes. Spouses, friends and other relatives of computer addicts will be pleased to hear about Getalife, a software program that claims to fight computer addiction. Install Getalife on the mo use potato's machine and program it to deactivate the machine for a particular length of time (from one hour to one month). Then watch normal life return to your household.

If, by now, you are protectively clutching your CPU and muttering threats against programs like Getalife, face the fact: You're a mouse potato.

Just doing my job

As more jobs become computer-centric, the number of computer addicts increases. Take computer programmers, for instance. Ms. X knows five computer languages and works at a well-known software company in Chennai. She estimates that she spends 12 hours a d ay on her computer at work alone. ``Perhaps another four or five hours once I get home,'' she shrugs. ``Everyone has Silicon Valley dreams,'' she explains. ``Work hard at your coding and you might be sent there.''

Of course, Silicon Valley in the United States is another scenario altogether. That is where Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail. That is where David Filo co-founded Yahoo! That is where computer addiction pays off. Except that, to stay ahead o f the competition, you need to stay glued to your screen. Evidently, the long hours don't stop once you have made your money, or why would David Filo be caught on film, sleeping under his desk, at a time when his personal net worth was $500 millions?

It is tough dealing with professional mouse potatoes because weaning them off the computer means getting them to take a break from work. But there are those who are always on the computer but not always on the job. Free Internet access at work has turned slacking-off into a fine art. Have you ever seen colleagues catching up on their snail mail at work? Imagine the furore if a colleague landed up at work, day after day, with armloads of personal reading material. And yet, the Internet lets you do all th is and more under cover, so to speak.

Who is to know as you sit before your computer, back straight, jaw set, fingers typing at breakneck speed, that you are not filing an urgent report but advising your best friend not to make a fool of himself over the girl on the fourth floor?

All I want is...

In India, we meet a number of mouse potatoes whose only wants are a 56-kbps modem and increased bandwidth. They constantly fret about the slow line-speed and fantasise about life in a First World country where a Web site appears on screen almost the inst ant you type the address and hit `Enter'. ``Now that's what you call quality of life,'' grins Sandeep, a Chennai-based freelance Web developer. He admits that he sometimes uses a stopwatch to time how long a site takes to download, mostly so that he can get riled about the results.

Many mouse potatoes believe that the Internet is all you need to survive. You can telecommute, research almost any topic, order food, listen to music, watch television shows, play games, meet friends, get the latest news, sell and buy almost anything, se nd e-cards, read books, shop for clothes, tend a virtual pet, plan your next holiday, buy the tickets, book the hotel... all through the Internet. Your professional, physical and social needs have not just been met, they have been amplified.

Social butterflies?

Gaming and chat sites are the fastest growing and busiest hubs of Internet traffic. The majority of computer addicts identify these sites as their special weakness. Donning multiple personalities, mouse potatoes go through a whirl of online social activi ties -- battling unknown contestants or chatting intimately with online friends. Chatting is speeded up by acronyms such as TTFN (Ta Ta For Now) and BTW (By The Way). Emoticons (so called because they convey emotions) such as smileys are tagged on to the ends of sentences or used as stand-alone statements. For example: (You have to tilt your head to the left to read these) Person A: %-)

Person B: 8-0

Translated, Person A says he has been staring at the screen for 15 hours. Person B responds with ``Omigod!''

Enough has been said already about social misfits finding online popularity. Well, you don't have to be a social misfit to find yourself in a chat room. But it is time to start worrying when you would much rather talk to your faceless online friends rath er than interact with the people around you.

Online communities are also social hubs. The world literally shrinks as people from Albania to Zululand get together in one spot to swap opinions, findings, arguments... Special interest groups can be useful. For instance, joining an online book group ca n be stimulating. However, being a member of over five such groups is definitely going to eat into your time and whiffs of addiction.

Help? Help!

Few mouse potatoes will admit to having an addiction problem. Sometimes, a few pointed remarks from friends and family can get them away from the computer. Sandeep recounts how he would unwittingly ruin social get-togethers. ``My wife and I would have gu ests over. At some point, I would ask the guests if they had seen such-and-such site or explored this-and-this technology. If they hadn't, we would all usually end up grouped around the computer, much to my wife's horror.'' Soon, his wife put her foot do wn and now the computer is left alone while they have guests over.

Getalife software tries to shame the addict into switching off the computer. It deactivates the computer but allows the mouse potato to turn it back on if he or she really wants to. However, once the computer comes back on, Getalife is programmed to flas h harsh messages across the screen such as ``It's okay to be a loser, but you're overdoing it'' or ``The sad thing is that you don't have anything better to do''.

But as Kimberly Young, Executive Director of the Center for Online Addiction, USA, says, ``You can try and change behaviour but unless a person is really motivated to change and wants help, that's only going to make them annoyed and they're going to take off the software.''

Sometimes, it can be more serious than you think. Maressa Hecht Orzack, a Harvard University psychologist, says that computer addiction is a real and growing problem. She is the founder-director of Computer Addiction Services at McLean Hospital, a Harvar d-affiliated teaching hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Signs and symptoms

Here is Orzack's list of the signs and symptoms: Using the computer for pleasure, gratification, or relief from stress; feeling irritable and out of control or depressed when not using it; spending increasing amounts of time and money on hardware, softwa re, magazines and computer-related activities; neglecting work, school or family obligations; lying about the amount of time spent on computer activities; risking loss of career goals, educational objectives and personal relationships; failing at repeate d efforts to control computer use.

If you are a mouse potato who wants to reform, check out www.computeraddiction.com

Help is also at hand at www.kiplinger.com where you can take an online test to determine whether you are an Internet addict and/or assess which areas of your life are most affected by your addiction.

Bad for health

Mouse potatoes are at risk from health side-effects. They skip meals or eat at irregular hours. They develop maladies such as meta carpel syndrome and tendinitis of the wrists. They become flabby from sitting in one spot for so long.

To these mouse potatoes, one can only say: Get a life. Before you start referring to your spouse as a peripheral. Before you start thinking of the human body as `wetware' -- a fragile, inefficient alternative to the shiny hardware of computers.

No couch potato, this!At some point in recent technology history, the phrase `mouse potato' was coined to describe people who seemed to have an umbilical attachment to their computer. And there are thousands of them out there.

The term mouse potato is derived from the term couch potato. Both refer to a form of addiction. The key difference is that the Web is interactive while TV is not.

Think of a couch potato and you imagine a listless, lethargic, passively entertained being with just enough get-up-and-go to switch channels.

Think of a mouse potato and you imagine someone hunched over a keyboard, furiously typing site addresses, energetically scoring off game opponents, thinking up witty responses to chat friends, rapidly downloading information... Indian couch potatoes have less than a hundred TV channels to choose from. Indian mouse potatoes, however, have the World Wide Web at their fingertips. That is, literally, millions of Web sites to choose from.

However, Indian mouse potatoes have not come of age in the area of Net shopping. A minuscule percentage of the country's Net users have international credit cards. India-based sites such as rediff.com and fabmart.com give you the option of paying by cred it card or cash on delivery. But this is obviously a far cry from, say, mouse potatoes in America who are able to order groceries online and have them home-delivered.

12-step therapy

1. We admitted we were penniless over our addiction and our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a CPU greater then ours could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our computer as we understood it.

4. We made a searching and fearless back-up of our hard-drive(s).

5. We admitted to God, ourselves, and another BBS the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all those viruses.

7. We humbly asked him to do away with bugs.

8. We made a spreadsheet of all the persons we had harmed.

9. We made direct amends, via modem, to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure or fry our modems.

10. We continued to make vigilant back-ups.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our CPU, praying only for a power supply to carry it all out.

12. Having had a good laugh out of this thing, we decided to make a hard copy of the above steps and post it on our walls.

Taken from www.humorspace.com