eBay "Addiction"

Following on from my post about Infomania and Facebook the BBC is today reporting on a set of workers who have lost their jobs because of ebay addiction.

Unison welfare officer Mark Fisher said people got “addicted” to certain web sites.

“People get very involved in eBay, Sky Sports and their favourite soccer teams. It happens in many, many offices,” he said.

“Obviously we cannot justify people spending a couple of hours of working time looking at these sites – but temptation was put in their way,” he added.

“We plan to push for the authority to make changes to its IT system, to help prevent workers landing themselves in hot water.”

He called for Internet access be limited to lunch break and that web access should be filtered at other times.

“We want them to take temptation out of people’s hands,” Mr Fisher said.

I suppose that’s one way of doing it, but is that really realistic. Is it actually practical to filter out every site that would potentially land people in hot water if they used it too much?

To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with the word “addiction” in this context either. If someone really is an Internet addict they shouldn’t be using the Internet at all. Alcoholics don’t go from over drinking to moderate drinking, they go to no drinking. It may be that for some people that is the case and they should stay away from the Internet all together, but I’m not sure that it’s really like that for everyone who overuses the Internet. I’d like to be able to suggest another word, but I’m not sure what that would be, perhaps “mania” is a better word.

What’s not told in this story is what level of training these people were given and whether they have been offered some form of rehabilitation. Traditional training has always focussed on the practical side of IT systems – click here, type there – but very little training has been undertaken on the social elements. As I’ve said before, I think we are moving into an age where we need to start training people to be safe Internet users in the same way as we train them to be safe drivers. Safe for themselves and safe for others. We need to start doing this as early as possible, from children through to adults, if we are going to avoid an epidemic in the future.