PART I Essays - Internet Culture, Behavioral Addiction,

PART I Welcome online!. These are often the first words many teenagers hear when they come back home from school. For the past few years, the Internets distractions to teenagers has been a major social problem, and I have read many articles on students who are addicted to the Internet. Also, I have seen many people get involved in surfing on the net, and have seen their systematic lives deteriorate with their access to the Internet. This social issue has become even more serious as the great strides in technological advancements entice teenagers with newer temptations. Because of all the attention given to this issue, I have decided to research it and learn more about how the Internet distracts teenagers, and its effects on society. I already know that most teenagers have some sort of access to the Internet. I have always thought that the Internet is only a source of information and sometimes a source of entertainment, but after reading the frequent articles that show up on the newspapers about the usage of internet, I now know that most teenagers go online mainly to play games and to chat with other friends. I also personally know some people who claim that they are stuck in the net, and I have also recently discovered that todays teenagers, like myself, spend the most time surfing on the net instead of reading books or watching television. However, I know that there are many more causes of teenagers bondings with the Internet, and I hope to find out exactly what makes teenagers to become so dependent on it. PART II The question of the Internet being a distraction to teenagers is such a broad issue, in the sense that the internet has too many ways of distracting teenagers. I will, therefore, focus on two specific questions to learn about. First, I will find out what features on the Internet lure teenagers into it. For example, I know there are chatrooms which anyone can enter to talk to other people from all over the world. Secondly, I hope to find out how this attraction to the Internet can affect ones life so much as to get them addicted to it, and how it changes peoples daily lives. PART III In the Preliminary stages of my research, I discovered that it would be much different from those I have done in the past because the base of my search would not be encyclopedias or books. Although I knew that the library would produce little information on the subject I am researching on, I could not stop questioning the credibility of the sources from the Internet, and first went to the school library in the end of December. Entertainment on the Internet being a quite recent social topic, my first look into the books at the library was fruitless. Even after looking through the magazines that were available, I only found a minimal amount of information. My next and final reaction was to look into the Internet. The week after my first attempt of gathering information, I went to a web site with a variety of search engines and typed in the words Internet entertainment. The results were overwhelming at first. Over a hundred thousand web sites were found on the topic Internet entertainment, but I soon discovered that they all led to web sites that hosted Internet entertainment. This was when I noticed that I needed to go to a search site of newspaper and magazine articles. Then I went to the school library and went to a search engine site that was called SIRS. When I typed in the same words as before, I only got two articles. From the two, only one carried the information I was seeking for, and so I had to search in other sites such as PROQUEST DIRECT, TIME magazine search, NY TIMES and SCMP search. Even after going to the biggest search sites on the Internet, I was only able to find four written sources and was frustrated because I knew that there are a lot more articles dealing with the types of entertainment found on the Internet. However, it was after the end of my search for written sources when I realized that I