Summary of one of my technology articles.

For my ICT assignment in college I was asked to create a blog and in it include two articles relating to an area of technology that interests me. I thought about it for a while and researched topics such as mobile phones, iPods and the internet. I looked at many different articles on each of the three, including is it possible mobile phones can produce radiation that can damage your health in the long term. Also that iPods’ can severely damage your hearing if the sound is above a certain level. However I eventually settled on the subject of the internet and the bad effects this technology can have on you.
I chose to research articles on the subject of internet addiction. I looked at many reports on the different news paper websites as well as just typing ‘internet addiction’ and similar phrases into the google search engine. I eventually found two articles relating to internet addiction.
One of the reports was based on why mothers are at risk of becoming addicted to the internet.
The second report was on China being forced to ban physical punishment for internet addicts (a treatment which is popularly used in China to cure people of internet addiction) after a boy was beaten to death as a result of it.
The article I choose to write a summary about is the report about China banning physical punishment for internet addicts.
Chinas ministry of health was forced to ban the use of physical punishment in boot camps that are designed especially to wean people, in particular teens, of the internet.
The Chinese Government issued many warnings to the people of China about the increasing health risks of spending too much time on the internet. Worried parents began enrolling their teenagers into organisations claiming to treat internet ‘disorders’. These organisations are mainly boot camps that are have a very military style technique and atmosphere.
The people that have enrolled for the ’extreme’ treatment in the boot camps are forced to take part in extreme physical activity or punishment instead of spending hours using the internet.
However when 15 year old Deng Senshan was reported dead after being beaten to death at one the boot camps, as well as another teenager being rushed to hospital from another one of these establishments because of kidney failure and water in his lungs after a very similar attack the government had to take action. As a result physical was banned from the internet treatment programmes all over China.
It also emerged that in July the Chinese government also was forced to ban electro-shock therapy as a treatment for internet addiction after a psychiatrist issued electro-shock therapy to over 3000 teenagers.
In China internet addiction is a massive problem, especially in teenagers. However it seems to be on the rise in other countries also. This is especially true in America. Because of the large amount of cases of internet addiction in America they have formed rehab groups especially for people with an addiction to the internet. These rehab centres seem to have a high success rate and China have recently begun to establish these rehab centres also.
From reading this article it seems that there is not yet a highly successful treatment for internet addiction and there is still a lot of experimentation. Most of which in this article was unsuccessful as well as very dangerous.