CCPR: Dr. Moreno, please tell us a little about your background.
Dr. Moreno: I am a pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist. My primary areas of research are social media and problematic internet use.
CCPR: What exactly is Internet addiction and where did the idea of it come about?
Dr. Moreno: A lot of the early literature used the term “Internet addiction” as something that was synonymous with other addictive behaviors. In some research they would take a scale, for example, for substance use, and essentially just “white-out” everywhere that said “substance use” and replace it with “Internet addiction.” That fascinated me because it didn’t seem like a very evidence-based approach, and I wasn’t sure whether Internet use was going to function like substance use or like a problematic behavior like gambling. Internet addiction early on was defined as essentially the same thing as a substance use disorder, with qualities like dependency and excessive and compulsive use. In my research, I tried to approach it more as a blank slate and look at what aspects of internet use would make it problematic.
[For more of this story, written by Megan Moreno, go to http://pro.psychcentral.com/pr...-media/0013004.html#]
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