Should Teenage Internet Addicts be Forced to Go to Boot Camp?

December 07, 2007

With 45-megabit download speeds available for a fraction of what a much, much slower connection costs in the U.S., broadband-wired coffee-and-junk food joints known as “PC-bangs” open around the clock on practically every street corner, and a youth culture that affords top online gamers such as Choi Yeon-sung the sort of notoriety and adulation that a LeBron James might get here, it’s probably no surprise that South Korea has perhaps the most Web-crazed  population on the planet. We’re talking about a nation where a few years ago, a 24-year-old man suffered a fatal blood clot after playing the Korean 3-D medieval fantasy game Mu Online for 86 straight hours, the first-ever instance of a person actually dying from excessive Internet use. According to the South Korean newspaper Chosunilbo, a recent government study found that nearly one in three South Korean adolescents have such a Web Jones that they can’t control their craving to log on, and 14 percent need mental health treatment and counseling for their addiction.

As a result, the New York Times reports, South Korea has opened the Jump Up Internet Rescue School (sorry, they apparently don’t have a Web site),  a boot camp that aims to cure webheads and console jockeys by making them do calisthenics, run obstacle courses, march in the rain and perform household chores -- all under continuous surveillance, to make sure they don’t slip in a few games or mp3 downloads on their Internet-capable cell phones (43 percent of South Koreans have them). The Times describes one 15-year-old participant, who was forced by his parents to attend because he was spending up to 17 hours a day online playing Sudden Attack and staring at Japanese comics, steeling up his courage to climb a telephone pole and then jump off in a harness.

“Do you have anything to tell your mother?” the drill instructor shouted from below.

“No!” he yelled back.

“Tell your mother you love her!” ordered the instructor.

“I love you, my parents!” he replied.

“Then jump!” ordered the instructor.

South Korea, it should be mentioned, isn’t the only Asian nation to try the militaristic cure for electronic junkies. China also has opened a camp for Internet addicts, run by an army colonel, outside Beijing. Reuters reports that the teenage trainees rise at 6:15 a.m. to don their khaki uniforms and march with a drill sergeant barking in their ears. Instead of gunning down digital adversaries online, the campers must participate in war game exercises in which they have to shoot at each other for real, albeit with laser guns.

"Many of the Internet addicts here have rarely considered other people's feelings. The military training allows them to feel what it's like to be a part of a team," Chinese camp psychologist Xu Leiting told Reuters. "It also helps their bodies recover and makes them stronger." One boot-camp inmate … er, participant, admitted that the harsh regimen had made him finally realize “the falseness of video games.”

You may be thinking: Subjecting teenage keyboard fiends to all this in-your-face militarism is kind of overkill, isn’t it? What’s the harm in wasting an hour or six slaying some pixels in Halo 3? On the other hand, you may have just Googled this 2006 New Scientist report of a Stanford University study that found that one in eight Americans showed signs of problematic Internet overuse. Should the U.S. create boot camps similar to the ones in Asia? Should youthful Internet addicts be compelled to play soldier? Express your opinion below.