Students stuck in cyber web

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 1996 | by John Keenan

Students are logging hundreds of hours on the World Wide Web - but not showing up for class.

College sophomore Brett Nosho spends hours surfing the World Wide Web, collecting photos of characters from Star Wars, Disney movies and the Broadway hit Miss Saigon for his home page. He logs on to his student account at the University of California at Santa Barbara six or seven times a day.

Nosho is not alone. As colleges in-crease access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, counselors and administrators are afraid some students won't be able to log off. "Sometimes I spend all night on-line, just screwing around on the Web and stuff," says Nosho, a chemical-engineering major.

Anonymous hotlines, 12-step programs and a "patch" for computer addicts may be in the offing, but for now University of Maryland counselors Jonathan Kandell and Linda Tipton are forming a support group called Caught in the Net. Further north, New York's Alfred University plans to include a section in freshman orientation on the dangers of the Web.

Ironically, people bitten by the Web bug aren't reclusive computer-science geeks. According to Judith Klavans, director of Columbia University's Center for Research on Information Access, they tend to be liberal-arts students whose exposure to computers before college amounted to word processing. "Computer nerds have been around forever," she says. "The Web has reached across that boundary."

Internet addiction surfaced last year when Alfred reported twice as many post-first semester dropouts compared with past years. The school appointed Connie Beckman, director of the computer center, to look into the problem. "There were kids with 1200 [Scholastic Assessment Tests] scores and professors said they were some of the brightest kids in the class -- when they showed up," she explains. "They had very high levels of late-night on-line activity and they had mega log-ins"--some as many as 18,000 a semester, or an average of 17 per day.

What were these students doing all night on the Web? Three Internet sites are popular among the college set. The oldest and most basic is the Internet Relay Chat, which allows people to write messages to each other simultaneously -- and anonymously. "With chat rooms, you can take on a new personality," says Klavans. "It's like when you're on an airplane and you have a conversation with the person next to you. You can pretend to be someone else for a couple of hours. With the Internet, that can last all night."

Another hot spot is the Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD room, where people engage in role-playing video games with peers across the country. But some students are pure-and-simple information junkies who spend their time checking sports scores, reading home pages or combing through the billions of bits of information readily available on-line.

Students show warning signs of online addiction when they forsake parties and gatherings, notes Kandell. They lose friends and become withdrawn--socializing only on the Internet. Klavans imagines that students enjoy communicating via the Net because they have more time to create clever lines. With the distance the computer provides, they don't have to deal with the stress or awkwardness of face-to-face conversation.

One of the problems most colleges face is that Internet access is free and unlimited. Most Alfred students, for example, live in dormitories with computer labs. The university plans to solve its problem by hiring professional resident directors instead of undergraduate students in the hope that they will notice when students log long hours on the Internet and skip class the next day. The University of Maryland is one of the few schools that shuts off student accounts after 40 hours of use a week.

For California's Nosho, however, the benefits of the information superhighway still outweigh the dangers: "My grades might have gone down a little, but the Internet is a great way for me to maintain contact with friends from across America."