No, that headline isn’t from the Onion.
Entire blog post here.
Xinhua story from July 16 here.
Sometimes a big story is eclipsed by a larger one. This is one of them.
The fact that China banned electroshock therapy for Internet addiction showed up in the later paragraphs of a lot of the same stories several weeks ago as the account of a Chinese boy getting beaten to death in a boot-camp style institution that was supposed to cure him of Internet addiction.
The bottom line in both stories is that in China the list of diagnostic standards for a lot of emotional and psychological conditions is kind of messy.
Apparently there are hundreds of institutions that make a lot of money “treating” kids who are diagnosed with “Internet addiction.” Internet addiction is defined as spending more than six hours a day at the computer. By that definition, it is claimed that 10 percent of the Internet-using public in China is addicted: 30,000. It was estimated that 3,000 had already been zapped.
I’m going to end this now without making any jokes about my friends who spend more than six hours a day on WoW.
GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY!
NY Times story here.
Tom Kelchner