[internet addiction] could we be addicted ourselves ... yikes

In a typical Beeb comment, wanting to trash the internet [or rather bloggers], even if it comes from China, they have a piece on internet addiction and people in hospital with it. The Beeb will claim it is just a news magazine bit of reportage but the barb is still in there.

They do, however, raise a valid question - internet addiction.

It seems to me it must be split into two parts - those who use it for social networking and those who use it for political comment - even on the shocking mating habits of the Tibetan yak and what are we going to do about it?

Many fellow political bloggers do both and though I don't use Facebook or any other forum or message board, I do enjoy dialogue on this site and in visiting and there are the occasional emails.

Addiction?

On the social side, undoubtedly it can lead to it and it can almost replace real friendships and not even "almost" at times. We all know of the bored person who lets himself/herself drop into this lifestyle and the "friendships" are very real in our minds.

Can internet friendships lead to real friendship? I'd like to think that in five cases so far, they have. Yet we've all heard tales of horror when two people finally hook up. Maybe that would happen anyway in Real Life.

On the question of addiction to political blogging, there is a nice quote on madness that you know you've crossed the sanity line when you feel your business or project would collapse if you weren't there for one week.

This is definitely a danger - to take oneself so seriously to the point of feeling that one's blog is more than what it is. My blog is a very small fish in the ocean of blogs and placed alongside the British mammoths, which themselves are placed alongside the megablogs in the U.S., it's chicken feed really.

The only strength in my blog is that the views expressed seem to be aligned with the views of many who'd be called small "c" conservative/libertarian/classic liberal. That's all. On visitor numbers, I'm not in the beginner or even the small class but I'm certainly no more than "medium".

My mate and I had a discussion about it and I said the main thing was to get the message up about Them and other naughties. Numbers to the blog are secondary. He said he couldn't give a damn about numbers - he does what he thinks is interesting. I replied that, well, numbers are important in that the message gets out but I had one particular blogger in mind who's in a former group of mine.

He gets around 1000 uniques a day, as he was wont to self-deprecatingly tell his readership every second day. He did this by aggregating, feeding, being signed up for schemes, advertising and whatever. I'm not mocking this and I have ads on my site too. If I knew what an aggregator was, maybe I'd do that too.

I'm at pains here to not try to occupy the high moral ground. Not a bit of it. Of course I was pleased with yesterday's visitors - who wouldn't be pleased? So, fine but I look at him and am not prepared to dedicate the blog to trawling for numbers, in order to appear to be a major player. I wouldn't write this if I didn't think it were so [I just wouldn't write anything about it, if it were].

Look, I do like to tackle major targets like the CFR and CBs and go to the heart of the rot. All the other things like quizzes and so on are also fun. Let's face it, it's nice to put those up and people come to do them.

Addicted?

Maybe. Could I leave the blog for a week? I'm thinking of trying it in September/October, at precisely the time that numbers return in force, so it's a good test. I need to know if I'm addicted. Could I stop the email friendships with various people? Not being an emailer of note, you'd think it would not be a problem but it would.

Could I stop visiting? Probably not because I like what I read and prefer it to the MSM. Seriously I do.

No apologies for the "I, I, I" in this post because talking of internet addiction always makes us look inside ourselves. So this has been thinking aloud this morning in this post.