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Picture this. An otherwise conscientious parent wakes up in the morning and cannot wait for her children to check out to school before she grabs her phone for the latest posts on her social media sites. Never mind that she slept in the wee hours surfing the Internet.

As the morning unfolds, this mother browses her phone for several minutes before attending to a few more chores. Subsequently, she will be on her phone intermittently the whole day, reading posts and communicating with both friends and strangers! As the children walk back home from school, the parent will give them scant attention as her eyes stay hooked to her phone. Even amidst her duties and responsibilities, the parent will keep one ear and one hand ready, just in case her phone needs her! Now, what kind of example has this parent set for her children? Are they not learning that one cannot do without a mobile phone? That the Internet is more fundamental than the basics?

Unbeknown to her and millions more, she is suffering from technology addiction, variously known as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). This is a fairly new phenomenon characterised by an inability to control use of various kinds of information and communication technologies. These include mainly the Internet, smartphones, tablets and social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It has become a universal affliction that we hardly seem to notice.

From the moment many of us wake up, to the time we lay down at night, gadgets have become a ubiquitous appendage to our daily lives.

This is not a Kenyan phenomenon though. In fact, the World Health Organisation’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse has raised the alarm on the emerging and grave dangers posed by excessive Internet use, including gaming platforms. Remember when former Internal Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i declared war on gaming dens?

Now, according to mental health experts, IAD symptoms include compulsive checking of text messages, frequent changing of Facebook status and uploading of “selfies”, a feeling of euphoria while on the Web, social withdrawal, loss of interest in non-ICT activities, and feelings of restlessness when offline.

Generally, IAD has been linked to stress, sleep disorders and depression. Techno addicts portray similar symptoms to people suffering from drug or substance abuse. Television used to be the culprit, but with the rise of the smartphone, the former is now almost irrelevant. Techno addiction is real. The situation prevailing in the example above is prevalent in many workplaces and homes today. People who are otherwise level headed have been turned into veritable attention seekers as they strive to emulate the lives of people who share their supposed glitzy lives on the Net. The Internet becomes a drug that victims of IAD must keep seeking shots of to remain on a high.

Let us not get it wrong. No one denies the power of social media to transform lives. Indeed, desperate cases and other lost causes have been overturned into fortunes overnight, as people mobilise help from popular platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook.

The converse is also true. Fortunes have been lost, and lives utterly destroyed due to social media indulgence. Con artists have learnt in great detail the psychology of social media addicts and deployed it effectively.  If adults have lost it, or do not care to control themselves, let them prevent the young generation from the dangers of IAD.

It is time to get back to the basics by putting down our smartphones and other ICT gadgets. We cannot spend an inordinately long time on social media, and then blame our children for anti-social behaviour learned online.  

— The writer is PhD student in International Relations