From
Google news.
Young Japanese people are evolving a new lifestyle for the 21st century based on the cellphones that few are now able to live without.
They are using their phones to read books, listen to music, chat with friends and surf the Internet -- an average of 124 minutes a day for high school girls and 92 minutes for boys.
While the wired world they now inhabit holds enormous advantages for learning and communicating, it also brings a downside, say experts who point to a rise in cyberbullying and a growing inability among teenagers to deal with other people face to face.
"Kids say what's most important to them, next to their own lives, is their cellphone," said Masashi Yasukawa, head of the private National Web Counselling Council.
"They are moving their thumbs while eating or watching television," he said.
The passion in 20-year-old Ayumi Chiba's voice backs up this assertion.
"My life is impossible without it," she says of her cellphone. "I used to pretend I was sick and leave school early when I forgot to take it with me."
As the multi-faceted cellphone takes centre stage in teen life, it plays a number of roles -- including a weapon that children can wield against each other with no thought for the consequences.
Yasukawa recalls the case of a 15-year-old girl who regularly received messages telling her: "Die," "You're a nuisance" and "You smell".
They turned out to have been sent by a friend in whom she had confided and who told her not to take the messages too seriously.
"The girl who was doing the bullying confessed it made her feel good to see the unease spreading on her friend's face," Yasukawa said.
Most middle school cellphone users rarely used their phone to talk, the survey found. Saito, of Kawamura Gakuen Women's University near Tokyo, said children seemed to want the security of communicating with someone, without the bother of dealing with a real person.
"Communication ability is bound to decline as cellphones and other devices are now getting between people," he said.
Saito's survey found that students can also use their cellphones as an emotional crutch, and the more problems they have at home, the more dependent they seem to become on their phones.
More than 60 percent of students who said they do not enjoy being with their families send 20 or more emails a day, compared with 35 percent of those happy with their families.
Related:
South Korea Opens Boot Camp to Confront Internet Addiction.
Tags:
communication,
cyberbullying,
relationships,
children,
Japanese,
behavior,
addiction
Posted in
Mobile ,
Psychology
Posted by skyleecm at
20:43 PM
From
iht.com.
The compound - part boot camp, part rehab center - resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.
Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.
South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on virtually every street corner.
But such ready access to the Web has come at a price, as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computers.
It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. A growing number of students have skipped school to stay online, shockingly self-destructive behavior in this intensely competitive society.
Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong Hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem.
They spend at least two hours a day online, usually playing games or chatting. Of those, up to a quarter million probably show signs of actual addiction, like an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever longer sessions online, and withdrawal symptoms like anger and craving when prevented from logging on.
To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)
The rescue camp, in a forested area about an hour south of Seoul, was created to treat the most severe cases. The camp is entirely paid for by the government, making it tuition-free.
During a session, participants live at the camp, where they are denied computer use and allowed only one hour of cellphone calls a day, to prevent them from playing online games via the phone. They also follow a rigorous regimen of physical exercise and group activities, like horseback riding, aimed at building emotional connections to the real world and weakening those with the virtual one. "It is most important to provide them experience of a lifestyle without the Internet," said Lee Yun Hee, a counselor. "Young Koreans don't know what this is like."
South Korea's gaming addicts. (BBC News)
Experts say the definition of an addict is less to do with the number of hours spent online, but more about the central role computers and the internet can play in someone's life.
Symptoms include:
- Preoccupation with the internet
- The inability to perform normal tasks in everyday life
- Losing control over yourself
- The disruption of daily routines and lifestyles
- Feeling nervous and anxious when not online
Visualising their dreams can help addicts wake up to reality and reduce time spent at the computer, counsellors believe.
Tags:
Korean,
Game,
behavior,
addiction,
therapy,
counseling,
internet,
social-life,
children
Posted in
Korean ,
Game ,
Psychology
Posted by skyleecm at
21:21 PM
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