Information Addiction

Via Kevin Heller, today’s NYT style section features an article discussing whether internet addiction is a serious problem: Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way: “These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that heavy use of the Internet qualifies as a legitimate addiction, and one academic expert called it a fad illness.”
I don’t know about internet addiction, but I’m pretty sure that I am an information addict. The internet and RSS/Atom, in particular, make it easy to get connected to new information all the time. This really isn’t much of a problem unless it keeps you from getting necessary things done.
And I think that reading loads of articles and posts for this blog is doing that– it does enable me to feel like I’m doing something productive and useful, while not actually doing anything productive, like finding a job. Of course, the correlary is that the job market for recent law school grads outside of Biglaw (and public-sector biglaw, like the DA) is very small. And the Biglaw hiring is generally done through OCI and summer programs, not after graduation. Most of the interesting, available attorney positions are for lawyers with 3-5 years of work experience. For many other positions, a JD is overqualified. It’s not that positions aren’t out there, but they seem few and far between, so I am frustrated.
The blog does at least keep me in touch with the law and current events. A small number of the posts are actually not bad…