By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

Hi my name is Sean and I am an Internet addict. Ooh, I need to use that as the quote underneath my avatar on MySpace. Anyways… back to poking my digital belly button; a recent study of Internet use trends by researchers at Stanford University has produced as study showing a trend towards widespread Internet addiction in the United States. ;()

I could have told you that some of us really like the Web without some big ol’ study. This study showed that one-in-eight Americans said they had trouble stating away from the Internet for several days, and one-in-11 tried to hide his or her online habits. The nationwide survey found 68.9 percent of responders were regular Internet users and the rest were people like me who weren’t about to answer the phone to take a survey when we were busy online posting pictures on a fishing bulletin board and downloading the new Bob Dylan record.

So I got a thing for the Web. I like it more than any other source of electronic media and I mean a lot more. Television viewers can waste their free time watching “E.R.” or “Project Runway” while I’m bettering myself by reading about the funerary habits of the Vikings and looking at pictures of Schnauzers wearing cowboy hats. Who wins that battle? I think the answer is obvious.

The study also indicated 8.2 percent of the surveyed individuals said they used the Internet to escape problems or a bad mood. Researchers are worried, since this percentage of people seem to use the Internet the way alcoholics use booze or addicts do drugs. I am personally not particularly worried about the lady who spent all afternoon online on MySpace or Gawker getting behind the wheel and causing an accident from impaired reaction time. Let ‘em surf – it seems like a benign alternative to me. Out of all the things people in this world could be strung out on, I think MSNBC.com may be the least of our worries.

I can also assure you Internet addiction is not as widespread as that study would have us believe, either. I use the frequency with which I hear “can you look such and such up for me on the computer ‘cause I know you’re good on that Internet?” to not only re-enforce my belief that the mouth-breathers will soon inherit the Earth, but also to show there are still plenty of people who do not use the Web at all. To a guy like me, who looks up a phone number online while the computer monitor from which he is reading it is sitting on a current phone book, those people are making a big mistake and passing on a major part of what makes life so great, like air conditioning and John Hiatt records.

The Internet, while being a negative in some of the surveyed people’s lives, brings out the best in me. First the Web makes me more scholarly, instead of just wondering who was the University of Alabama’s first quarterback or where in Romania Transylvania is or what is the best soil ph in which to grow Satsumas, I can use the Web to quench my thirst for the arcane and not have to walk around with all those questions waiting in line to be answered.

I’m also a lot more social because of the Web. Before the advent of e-mail, it was a Herculean trail to get me to write someone a letter. Now I send multiple correspondences daily to people in the office right next to mine. I like the cyber social aspect so much I get online and chat it up with people I would not even make eye contact with in the grocery store.

Am I addicted to the Web? Absolutely. I’ve been surfing the whole time I’ve been writing this and trust me that Viking funerary stuff is pretty cool. I also think the researchers who are taken aback by the amount of time people spend online should remember most of those people would be engaged in some other sort of mindless activity for those same number of hours if they weren’t online.

As for the mood altering effects, I’ve been made happy more than once by reading a book and I don’t see that as the same as a drunk or a junkie. So leave us Internet addicts alone Stanford researcher guys, we are just minding ours and everybody on MySpace’s business and don’t need to be hassled by people who don’t consider an Internet browser as one of their most important possessions.

By the way I would have never found the information of this survey if it hadn’t been online.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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