This story [via Ars Technica] talks about Internet addiction:

The only way we as psychiatrists will figure out whether Internet addiction exists as a separate entity from other psychiatric illnesses is if we have consistent criteria to evaluate it.

They’ve even got a cute contrived acronym: MOUSE, the E in which stands for “Excessive thoughts or anxiety when not online.”

Is internet addiction at all shocking? Being online turns you into a superhuman (”Man plus”). You can know anything and talk to anyone, immediately. Being online, absolutely literally makes you a lot smarter than when you’re offline. Is it so surprising that people don’t want to give this up? When you’ve tasted godhood, the only thing you want is more.

Mainstream users don’t understand how internet addiction happens. I suspect this is because their interfaces are bad. If you have to wade through Hotmail every time you want to send an email, you’ll never really get involved in the computer. Compare the Hotmail ordeal to mutt<enter>m Name<tab><enter>Subject<enter>i Body<Esc>:wq<enter>y. That’s mostly incomprehensible to your average Citizen, but those who persist will find the immense increase in efficiency tightly integrates them with the software. Compare also a google search: users of IE will by default have to go to google.com, and type their query. Toolbar users are better off. Other browsers are even better: with Mozilla Firebird, to do a google search, type CTRL-K query<enter>. I’m sure there are plenty more shortcuts and optimisations that I don’t know. When I do know them, I’ll be deeper online than before.

(I suppose the lesson here is that the keyboard is still the best interface hardware we have for navigating the web.)