Problematic Internet usage (PIU) describes excessive and compulsive Internet usage which affects offline behavior – work, school, real-world relationships, etc. Email is one activity which may lead to PIU. People often feel compelled to check their email extremely frequently due to the unpredictable nature of email. You generally cannot tell in advance when that next unread message will be sitting in your inbox. (On occasion, you may be waiting for someone’s reply or an automated email to confirm account registration. But even in these cases you do not know exactly when the email will arrive – so you check more frequently.) As discussed in class, this lack of reward predictability is a very effective way to entice individuals to continually return for more. This phenomenon is what makes things like gambling such an addictive force.
Email users tend to exhibit compulsive use rather than excessive use. That is, they won’t be able to control their urge to check email, but they generally won’t spend a longer amount of time than planned checking email. If email is checked frequently, it will only take a short amount of time to sift through the few unread messages that do show up periodically. There simply isn’t much else to do when checking email, so excessive use is not common. However, it is still PIU because continually disrupting your workflow to check email hurts productivity. It could be used as a form of procrastination, reducing academic performance or efficiency in the workplace.
Being an asynchronous and feature-poor medium, email tends to take a back seat to technologies like IM and social networking sites when it comes to day-to-day social interactions. So Caplan’s model is less applicable to PIU of this particular online activity. Compulsive email checkers do not necessarily suffer from loneliness or depression. In my experience, email messages are likely to be infrequent communication between people with weak ties, or notification of ongoing events. An individual who feels the need to promptly respond to or be aware of these messages may well be highly social, rather than lonely and depressed. Consequently, they do not necessarily prefer online interaction – they might simply use it because others will use it as a means to contact them.
It is interesting to draw a comparison to traditional mail here. We don’t check our regular mail as often as we check email because email is much more accessible and convenient. Also, the near-instantaneous nature of email as compared to traditional mail may generate a stronger need to reply quickly. If you know that your reply would take a couple of weeks to get to its recipient rather than a couple of minutes, waiting an extra day or two to check your mailbox doesn’t seem so bad.
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I think you make some really good points at the end concerning computer mediated communication (CMC) speed and how that plays a role in the differences in responding through traditional mail versus email. One thing I found interesting was that when I started looking at the affordances of internet interaction and comparing that to traditional mail, they are actually quite similar in nature except that traditional mail takes much longer. Some food for thought on traditional mail v.s. email:
1. Greater anonymity: if you have a secret pen pal like some of us may have had in middle school before internet stalking all you may have had was an address and some kid that you knew you would probably never see.
2. Greater control of self-presentation: this is true for both email and traditional mail
3. More intense and intimate self-disclosure: the same principles apply here for the pen pal in another country and sending someone an email online that you have never met before. However, characteristics of CMC influenced this like the amount of time between information exchange traditional vs email
4. Less perceived social risk and social responsibility: this is a given if your pen pal is in Russia or some other area (even within the US) that is socially distant
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