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Hello, my name is Richard and I am an ego surfer. The habit began about five years ago, and now I need help. Like most journalists, I can’t deny that one of my private joys is seeing my byline in print. Now the Intemet is allowing me to feed this vanity to an ever greater extent, and the occasional sneaky web search has grown into a full-blown obsession with how high up Google’s ranking my articles appear when I put my name into the search box. When I last looked, my best effort was a rather humiliating 47th place. You know you have a problem when you find yourself competing for ranking with a retired basketball player from the 1970s.
Not that I’m alone in suffering from a disfunctional techno-habit. New technologies have revealed a whole raft of hitherto unsuspected personality problems: think crackberry, powerpointlessness or cheesepodding. Most of us are familiar with sending an email to a colleague sitting a couple of feet away instead of talking to them. Some go onto the web to snoop on old friends, colleagues or even first dates. More of us than ever reveal highly personal information on blogs or My Space entries. A few will even use Intemet anonymity to fool others into believing they are someone else altogether. So are these web syndromes and technological tics new versions of old afflictions, or are we developing fresh mind bugs
Developing a bad habit is easier than many might think. "You can become addicted to potentially anything you do," says Mark Griffiths, an addiction researcher at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, "because addictions rely on constant rewards." Indeed, although definitions of addiction vary, there is a body of evidence that suggests drug addictions and non-drug habits share the same neural pathways. While only a hardcore few can be considered true technology addicts, an entirely unscientific survey of the web, and of New Scientist staff, has revealed how prevalent techno-addictions may have become.
The web in particular has opened up a host of opportunities for overindulgence. Take Wikipedia. Updating the entries--something anyone can do--has become almost a way of life for some. There are more than 2,400 "Wikipedians", who have edited more than 4,000 pages each. "It’s clearly like crack for some people," says Dan Closely at Cornell University in New York, who has studied how websites such as Wikipedia foster a community. To committed Wikipedians, he says, the site is more than a useful information resource; it’s the embodiment of an ideology of free information for all.
Then there are photolog sites like Flickr. While most of us would rather die than be caught surreptitiously browsing through someone else’s photos, there need be no such qualms about the private PICS people put up on these sites. Most people using Flickr and similar sites spent time each day browsing albums owned by people they had never met. They do this for emotional kicks. Khalid and Dix suggest: flicking through someone else’s wedding photos, for example, allows people to daydream about their own nuptials.
Email is another area where things can get out of hand. While email has led to a revival of the habit of penning short notes to friends and acquaintances, the ease with which we can do this means that we don’t always think hard enough about where our casual comments could end up. This was the undoing of US broadcaster Keith Olbermann,who earlier this year sent a private email in which he described a fellow MSNBC reporter as "dumber than a suitcase of rocks". Unfortunately for Olbermann, the words found their way into the New York Daily News.
Pam Briggs, a specialist in human-computer interaction at the University of Northumbria, UK, says the lack of cues such as facial expressions or body language when communicating electronically can lead us to overcompensate in what we say. "The medium is so thin, there’s little room for projecting ourselves into it," says Briggs. "When all the social cues disappear, we feel we have to put something else into the void, which is often an overemotional or over-intimate message."
The habit of forwarding jokey emails or YouTube videos- think Diet Coke and Mentos fountains- can also say a lot about how people want to be perceived, Briggs adds. "We rarely want to be seen as too serious, so we try to project more of our personality into email." This could also explain why many bloggers expose private information that they would never shout out to a crowded room.

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