Tania'a Boyfriend's Drug of Choice

When I first started using America Online at the age of around eleven or so, I thought that chat rooms were the most unbelievable creation I had ever seen. There I was, a preteen girl with the ability to enter any chat that I wanted. And although I did not constantly use chat rooms to talk to others, there are numerous people that have in fact been sucked into the world of Internet anonymity and chat room addiction. Chat rooms become popular because of their anonymous nature. As Wallace indicates, people are able to have a locus of control, where one can control what to share and what not to share about themselves. Davis' social comfort adds to peoples' interest in chat room as well since many people feel more comfortable in an anonymous situation. Chat rooms afford people the opportunity to become someone else. A shy, lonely person in face to face interaction has the ability to become an extroverted person due to the fact that in an online chat, no one really know the truth about who you are in real life.

I recently came across a post from a girl named Tania asking for help regarding her boyfriend's addiction to chat rooms. Basically, her boyfriend's only relationships have ever been from online communication as well as some phone communication. Tania and her boyfriend met in a chat room, but after they started dating, she assumed that he would discontinue his interest in chat room interaction. Suffice it to say, he did not. Her boyfriend remained a constant user, entering chat rooms to meet women day and night. This falls under Caplan's idea of excessive use since he would partake in chat room conversations much more than any normal, usual or planned amount. Tania also says that her boyfriend would become agitated and shaky with an inability to concentrate when he tried to stop using the chats. This compulsivity of use shows that even though he wanted to stop and felt guilty that he was not spending time with his girlfriend, there was an inability to control his Internet usage.

Tania's boyfriend seems to fall into the categories in which Problematic Internet Users are defined by both Davis and Caplan. Since his only interaction with women came when he started using online chat rooms, Tania's boyfriend most likely turned to them out of loneliness. The Internet provided an outlet for him to "build up a phony relationship with these women and then simply moved on without actually meeting them," something that he had never had the courage to do in real life. These chat rooms also provided a social comfort for him in that the anonymity of the Internet afforded him an ability to have a diminished impulse control. These factors have been proven significant in predicting Problematic Internet Use.

Caplan's Theory of Psychosocial Well-Being also relates to many people's obsession with chat rooms. For example, Tania's boyfriend has trouble meeting women in face-to-face interaction, thus giving himself a negative perception about his own social competence. As a result, he started entering chat rooms, preferring online communication due to its anonymity and less threatening nature. The perceived social benefits and more social control that chat rooms afford also create a preference for Internet interaction rather than face to face. This interest in online communication then leads to Tania's boyfriend's excessive and compulsive use of chat rooms to the point where he shakes when he has not has his "fix" as if the chat room is his drug of choice. Eventually, the cycle should continue and this excessive, compulsive use of the Internet should create even more psychosocial problems.

Tania's boyfriend's situation is slightly unique in that there is no evidence that his use of chat rooms intensified his psychosocial problems. It is also unclear how great his psychosocial problems were to begin with. However, his situation does show the problematic nature of chat rooms, much like the numerous other people that have made online chat rooms their drug of choice.

Link to Tania's cry for help:
http://www.selfpsychology.com/_spbb3/00000037.htm

http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-gift-and-curse.html
http://comm245blue.blogspot.com/2007/11/9-well-at-least-my-addiction-pays-well.html