At 9 a.m. on Monday, students are stumbling into class, greeting each other with grunts, mumbles and groans. Bloodshot eyes stare around the room and attempt to focus on the blackboard. The teacher calls for homework and maybe half the class even bothers to look through their folders. What could possibly be the cause of this numbed state of mind so prevalent in today’s schools and colleges? For some, it’s the party that lasted until 5 a.m. For a few others, it’s the late-night exam cram or term paper. And for the thousands of people like me, well, it’s because we’re addicts.
What narcotic is responsible for the lack of mental coherence in hordes of today’s students? We’re law-abiding citizens (for the most part), preferring caffeine and nicotine for our chemical fixes. Our drug of choice isn’t made by Anheuser-Busch, Winston-Salem or even Folgers. It’s produced, distributed and sold to the masses by companies with names like Dell, Compaq and Gateway.
Computers have become the newest abused substance. Days and weeks vanish into the vaccuum-tube screen with only two missed classes, three hours of sleep and a headache from staring at the monitor for 16 hours straight.
Everyone has his or her preferred escape from reality-Internet browsing, instant messaging or video games. For me and for others, video games are the most addictive. Entire conversations center around “Warcraft III” and “Unreal Tournament 2003”, games where friends leave the real world behind and smite their brain cells and their pals over the school Ethernet.
LAN parties vie with keggers as the best way to shut down young minds. Multiplayer online role-playing games (a.k.a. “Evercrack”) allow players to escape reality en masse better than anything you can buy at your local street corner. When getting online is an impossibility, single-player games such as “Morroweed” will hook any gaming junky.
More social addicts acquire a taste for instant messaging or its slower sister, the forum. Here, peer pressure plays a big part. The instant messenger addict is a normal, productive individual until the first beep-beep “Hi” window from Blu42 shows up.
Unlike alcohol, cigarettes or less legal substances, this peer pressure can be applied over long distances. Receiving an instant message can make you forget everything you were doing for hours. Some students have absolutely no privacy because their instant message-junky roommate never leaves the room. The roommate’s entire social life is conducted over the wires.
On the other hand, computer junkies don’t die from emphysema. Computer gamers don’t sell their houses/souls/bodies for another fix. I still manage to turn in assignments on time and even keep my grades up.
Computers often lower student productivity, but as an alternative to other distractions, they are hardly dangerous. Real, useful information can be obtained through browsing, and instant messaging allows even widely separated friends to remain in touch. Even video games teach skills like problem solving and teamwork. Nobody ever learned problem solving from shooting up.
Computers have become a popular way to escape reality among today’s college students. Video games, general browsing and instant messaging take up massive amounts of students’ time. Even so, compared to more traditional means of escapism, computer abuse is a mild and unthreatening disorder. Now, if you will excuse me, sup2b just messaged me, and my wizard on “Morroweed” is almost to level 20.
Nathan Alday is a junior aerospace engineering major.