Why do we start our addiction to electronic devices? How can we prevent Internet addiction?
Sisy Wong
Whenever you buy a cell phone or any other electronic device, have you ever thought about are we going to be the overuse of them? Besides, have you ever thought about when do we started to be addicted to our smartphones, video games, televisions, iPads and so on. Most of our answers are maybe or never. People rarely think about how those products are affected us in our daily lives especially teenagers. In the teen’s age, they only think about what is interesting with the products and investigate how to use those new products due to their immature minds. The only people can take control of their electronic devices are their parents. However, they are not always staying with them, so they cannot really prevent the addiction to happen to their children. Deeply addicted to those devices can be really harmful to our health, daily lives and maybe led to deaths. Apart from that, they made a distance between us and the real world. Through this research, I found out the addiction problem is basically based on three areas, parents, friends and schools.
Nowadays, almost everyone has a cell phone or other kind of electronic devices. However, people spent most of their time on their electronic devices. According to the academic journal written by Prekshaa Jain, a study was selected in a total of 146 out of 150 students. 29.5% of male and 70.5% of females aged around 18.5 has an addiction problem on their cell phones. 55.47% of the majority of students were using cell phones for one to three years. There are 36.3% of them use their cell phones for three to four hours on a normal day and 35.6% of them use 11-20 times a day. Besides, 34.9% of the students use their cell phones the first time in the morning within five minutes and 21.6% of them mostly use for social networking and 20.27% of them use it for listening to music. Those results show that there has been a serious problem with teenagers spend too much time on their cell phones. Therefore, we should start to be more focus on this problem.
The first reason for teenagers being addicted to electronic devices is the new generation of the Internet world. Nowadays, technology is well-developed lots of electronics retailers appeared in the market. A case in point, Apple store, Samsung and LG are the biggest companies in the electronic devices market. Besides, Microsoft is the biggest company in the computer software market. Since there are more and more devices have been invented, teenagers are curious about those products and keep updated their devices. According to Catherine K. Y Kwong and Ben Y. F Fong’s academic journal, a Thematic Household Survey performed by the Census and Statistics Department (2017) studied the use of personal computer(PC) and the Internet penetration in households has shown that the percentage of the usage of the Internet among people over 10 years old increased from 87.5% in 2016 to 89.4% in 2017. That’s a large number of teenagers using those technique products, almost every teenager has their own device. Therefore, they started to get into the Internet world at a young age.
Apart from that, in the “relationship among family environment, self-control, friendship quality, and adolescents’ smartphone addiction in South Korea: Findings from nationwide data” academic journal, people who had experienced domestic violence and parental addiction have an increased risk for smartphone addiction after controlling for all potential variables. According to figure 1 in the journal, 41.10% of people that have domestic violence have smartphone overuse. Compare to the normal family, people that have domestic violence have a greater risk of addiction on their cell phones. The reason why those teenagers have domestic violence have the addiction problem might be they try to escape from the miserable reality and want to get love from the Internet world. The journal also claims that family dysfunction and smartphone addiction was not that important in those teenagers who have self-control or friendship quality. This claims that family dysfunction really affects teenagers to be associated with smartphone addiction.
The other reason would be the effects of friends. There are lots of teenagers playing video games nowadays as they are experienced and pungent. Most of them cannot quit video games and have a video game obsession. In recent years, there are more and more violent and addictively realistic games of war have been invented and a lot of teenagers are getting too deep into the game’s world. Most of them started to engage the game’s world by the invitation of their friends. In the “Gun: Video Game Obsession” video source, teenagers felt physically compelled to play with the video games and every time they could not play the video games, they felt angry and upset. Some of them spent most of their time and even not going to school for playing video games. Sitting in front of computers for a long time might have health problems. According to the academic journal “Massively multiplayer online role-playing game induced seizures: a neglected health problem in Internet addiction” written by Yao Chung Chuang, the results of basic clinical data, seizure semiology, laboratory findings, and therapy for the ten patients. The age at onset of an online game induced seizure is fourteen to thirty years old, with an average age of 19.8 years old. Eight patients had a history of epileptic seizures. They are aged between eleven to nineteen years old and the average age is 14.5 years old. In this study, there are 80% of males and 20% female. Thus, this shows that males have a predominance of having epileptic seizures. The study also shows that six of them playing a special game console, PC games, Chinese chess, and card games while having seizures. This data shows that those teenagers are really addicted to video games even they have a health problem and video games are harmful to our health.
All in all, addiction to electronic devices is harmful to our health and might destroy our lives. Therefore, we need to do some actions to prevent addiction before it happens. Since parents are the guardians of their children, they have the ability to take the supervision of their children. One of the suggestions is that they can control the use of time on electronic devices. Since teenagers have immature minds, most of them have lack of self-control, the best way to do is to set up a time schedule, so they can follow the time period to balance their daily lives and lecture times. Furthermore, schools can provide education on the proper use of electronic devices, so that teenagers can learn the basic knowledge of preventing addiction and prevents that tragedy happens. We all know the attraction of the whole new products, but it is worth it to spend all your time on those useless things than exploring something interesting in real-life? Whether those products are going to be the real obstacle of our interpersonal relationships? Please think about it next time when you pick up your phones.
Worked sites:
1. KIM, H.-J. et al. “Relationship among family environment, self-control, friendship quality, and adolescents’ smartphone addiction in South Korea: Findings from nationwide data”. PLoS ONE, Feb 5 2018,
https://doi-org.ezproxy.capilanou.ca/10.1371/journal.pone.0190896
2. KWONG, C. K.; FONG, B. Y. “Promotion of appropriate use of electronic devices among Hong Kong adolescents”. Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management, 2019,
3. Caloz M, Findlay G. “Top Gun : Video Gaming Obsession”. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2009,
4. CHUANG, Y.-C. “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game-Induced Seizures: A Neglected Health Problem in Internet Addiction.”. CyberPsychology & Behavior, Aug 2006, p. 451-456,
5. Prekshaa Jain, Sachin Ratan Gedam, Pradeep S Patil. “Study of smartphone addiction: prevalence, pattern of use, and personality dimensions among medical students from rural region of central India”. Open Journal of Psychiatry and Allied Sciences, 2019,