Who gets addicted to the Internet?
Although any one of us can become addicted, some trends do exist. Some people are drawn to a “faceless community,” one where a person can enter into multiple cyber-relationships with anonymity and create one or multiple new on-line personas. Certainly persons with quite a lot of discretionary time on their hands are susceptible, including homebound people or college students adjusting to the new schedule on a university campus. Gender does seem to influence the types of applications and underlying reasons for Internet addiction. Men tend to seek out power, status, dominance and sexual fantasy on-line, gravitating more toward the sources of information glut, aggressive interactive games, and sexually explicit chat and cyber-porn sites. Women seek out supportive friendships, romantic partners, and prefer anonymous communication in which to hide their appearance. It seems to be a natural conclusion that attributes of gender played out in Cyberspace parallel the stereotypes men and women h