Infomania worse than marijuana for I.Q.?

- then the combination of them must be deadly.

snip:

The Gran Cyber Cafés now serve this purpose, he said. "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong." Staying in the Gran Cyber Cafés, he concluded, is now part of jibun-sagashi, or the search for the true self.

Nevertheless there's something a little shameful about spending a solo hour, or two, or seven, on a wanton media bender. It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the I.Q. than regular marijuana use. But, as I read about the study in my pod, I came to doubt that such warnings would ever make people temper their infomaniac ways; maybe these are the I.Q.'s we're stuck with now.


from the New York Times