‘Internet addiction’: History and background

It was the work of Kimberley Young that drew the attention of researchers to investigate ‘internet addiction’. Her first paper (Young, 1996) on internet addiction was a case study of a 43-year-old woman whose husband was seemingly addicted to AOL chatrooms, spending 40 to 60 hours online at a time. It should be noted that at that time internet connections were dial-up connections (computers were connected through the landline phone line), with an estimated hourly cost of about US$2.95 per hour. This created a financial burden for the family and eventually led to divorce as the husband met other women in these online chatrooms.

Replicating and adjusting the criteria for gambling in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edn) (DSM-IV) (APA, 2000), Young (1998) proposed a set of criteria for diagnosing what she called ‘internet addiction’ (IA). She selected eight of the ten gambling criteria from DSM-IV that she thought also applied to internet use as the criteria for identifying IA, namely, preoccupation with the internet, a need for an increasing amount of time spent online to achieve the same amount of satisfaction, repeated efforts to curtail internet use, irritability, depression or mood lability when internet use is limited, staying online longer than anticipated, putting a job or relationship in jeopardy to use the internet, lying to others about how much time is spent online, and using the internet as a means of regulating mood. She argued that exhibiting five out of these eight criteria should be diagnosed as IA and the individual considered internet-dependent. Young admitted that her data collection strategy based on voluntary online or telephone surveys was somewhat biased, and that most people formed an ‘addiction’ to specific applications, services or networks on the internet rather than the internet itself. Nonetheless, her results highlighted several differences between ‘addicted’ and ‘non-addicted’ groups in her study, with implications for psychological and occupational wellbeing.

In parallel to Young's work, in Europe, research into IA began with the publication of Griffiths’ (1995) paper on ‘Technological addictions’ that prompted further investigation into IA (Griffiths, 1996a, 1998) as well as specific online ‘addictions’ such as internet gambling ‘addiction’ (Griffiths, 1996b).