Problems of Internet Addiction and Its Effects on the Life Style of University Students

Abstract

The enormous growth of technology and innovations that rules today’s world has become an inevitable sophistication for every human being. Today Internet facility has become a complementary aspect for transforming and disseminating the new innovations. Internet is now a highly accessible and affordable facility even for a common man of any society. However the internet also has made many youths and children to be more dependent on it which started giving adverse effort and even many leading forums stated alarming thissituation. In this circumstance thisstudy has been initiated to examinethe level of Internet addiction and Interpersonal problemsof University students. It also covers effects in their life stylepatterns and behavior based on the level of Internet addiction of Student’s studying in PMU. Internet addition (IA) is a new disorder described in 1996 by the psychologist Kimberly Young. There are many studies about internet use and internet addition and it is one of the things that influence our daily life. The researcher has adopted descriptive cum diagnostic research design for the study. The universe were 302 final year student’sfrom 12 departments ofPeriyarManiammaiUniversity,Vallam, Thanjavur , while 50 students are the respondents for this study . Convenient random sampling has been used to select the final respondents of the study. The tool developed by Kimberly Young in 1996, namely Internet Addiction Test (IAT) Demographic factors (age, gender and grade of level) were administrated to measure the internet addition and Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistic. It is alarming that the result shows the levels of excessive users among the respondents are frequent users. The result of the study reveals many facts that the student’s are spending too much of time on internet, unnecessarily accessing the internet without any purpose, too much of money spend for internet, leads in reducing their sleeping hours and gets very little time for sleeping , lack of face to face interaction in their family, absence of interpersonal communication. Therefore the study alarms that the internet addiction is changing the life style of the student’s and may have a negative effect in the days to come.

Keywords: Internet Addiction, Effects of Internet, Excessive Internet usage, Student Life Style