PIU – Problematic Internet Use. Who thought that checking up on your children via Internet can lead to anything problematic? Well, it can. Especially if you use online deception by becoming someone else (discussed by Hancock). I read an article about two years ago with th following story:
A 50+-year-old concerned (married) father initially felt his son was engaging in PIU by spending too much time in yahoo! chat rooms and talking to friends on AIM based on seeing an academic plunge in his 15-year-old sons report card and catching his son one day talking in a yahoo! chat room while he should have doing homework. This gave this man motivation to actually become his son to see how chatrooms are so time consuming so that way he can “give [his] son the proper advice because [he] didn’t want to be too pushy by banning his sons internet use since [his son] did need to use the internet for schoolwork.” He didn’t tell his son about his upcoming stalking mission but I’m assuming that his son eventually found out. At first, he could only go to the chatrooms that his son went to and BS for sometime. The unique affordance of the space was that this room was a room for people interested in Dance Dance Revolution. It wasn’t clear whether or not he was a DDR fanatic but he did know enough to spark and maintain conversation. He owned his own consulting company and did the majority of his work from home so he had some free time during the day to stalk. After stalking for a number of weeks, the 50+-year-old man met a 14-year-old that he (or should I say his son) began to build some sort of a relationship with. He somehow also managed to get his sons AIM password and begun speaking with this girl consistently. For a while, he was speaking as the son but later admitted that it was him the whole time speaking to her. For some reason, they girl continued to speak with the man. Long story short, he took a few trips out to visit her and eventually was caught having sex with her by this girls parents, they called the cops and he is currently serving 10 years in prison for having sex with a minor. The funny part about it is that if he had time to speak with a girl as his son, which meant that the son was not on AIM at that time and he had achieved his goal of keeping his son off the Internet.
I guess the effects of the online psychological space and his own psychosocial “discrepancies” took over. Due to the Locus of Control that this man had, he likely felt that it would be no harm to be deceptive because I guess he can always throw the blame on his son if he went out of line. Referring to the Social Comfort rationale presented by Davis, Flett and Besser, he must have felt safe and peaceful being in this chatroom. However, he should have had someone else “accept him for who he is.” I never was educated on the specifics of the online conversations but did hear that they were pretty “to the point” in the sense that he hinted at having sex with this girl a number of times. In regards to loneliness/depression, it was found out that he and his wife were going through what I’ll call a “time of trial” where they fought consistently and it seemed that they only wanted to stay together for their son. His wife had a full time job so the only time they would see each other would be during the evening and since they did not sleep together, I could estimate that they saw each other for a total of 2.5 hours a day. Tying in with the Caplan study, the rocky relationship likely was leading him down a path of depression and loneliness and the depression and loneliness exponentiated his PIU and resulted in doing something that I consider “the most disgusting thing in the world.” He’s a consultant so I would think he would be busy enough to not have so much time to chat on the Internet. Maybe he wanted to temporarily forget about things that he had to do but didn’t want to but the bigger issue is that his psychosocial took over and he was too weak-minded to cut off communication with the girl and he got busted. Too bad.
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2 comments:
This was an interesting (if not supremely disturbing) story, and a good analysis. Instances like these make it clear that the real root of problematic Internet use is psychosocial predisposition, and not the nature of the communications medium itself. The factors in this guy’s life – marital troubles, tough work schedule, etc – definitely made the Internet into an escape for him, one which eventually became seriously problematic. It’s really too bad that nobody was looking out for him like he was for his son!
This story was really out there. I know its natural for parents to care about their child's internet use to an extent. Ironically this guy seems to have succumbed to problematic internet use himself. I can understand this dad going on his sons AIM account a couple of times to search around a bit and talk to a few people. I would think that as a parent he has the right to check his sons internet use. I also don't see anything wrong with pretending to be the son once or twice. This man obviously had problems before he even thought of checking his sons AIM. It would seem that the internet is quite good at exposing those flaws that make a persons susceptible to PIU. I think its really interesting how the internet can drastically shape a persons behavior and cause them to do things they would normally not be expected to do.
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