Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyberfreaks, and Those Who Love Them. - Review - book review

Adolescence, Spring, 2000

GREENFIELD, David N. Virtual Addiction: Help for Netheads, Cyberfreaks, and Those Who Love Them. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 1999. 238pp. $12.95 (p).

Anyone that's spent an entire night surfing the net or procrastinating at work by e-mailing friends knows the lure of the cyberworld. But when does the draw of an innocent online connection turn into something else? Greenfield specializes in treating clients with an Internet addiction. He has evidence that too much online time is sometimes tied to out-of-control shopping and gambling debts, cyber affairs that devastate relationships, and a form of escapism so alluring that some users have lost their jobs, their friends, even their kids. Virtual Addiction spells out the twelve certain warning signs of true Internet addiction and suggests a variety of concrete steps for those who meet the diagnosis. There are simple "Virtual Abuser" or "Virtual Addict" tests, and readers learn from vignettes what happens to others when online pleasures get to be too much of a good thing. Of interest to the addict and the average user, Virtual Addiction answers that question most of us have at one point or another posed, "Can th is new technology be bad for us?"