Fifth week assignment
That day I was diagnosed to internet addiction then I was sent to treatment by my parents.
16/05/2015
Unstoppable electric shocks keep stinging me, it feels like a million worms gnawing at my brain. A series of haunting voices kept forcing me to admit my mistakes. If I answered incorrectly, I would suffer a more intense electric shock.
20/05/2016
I’ll never resist…all I have to do now is confession! To confess of my addiction, my ignorance, my ungreatfulness! I will kneel and always follow your guidance… that is the oracle!
03/07/2017
When I was out from the hospital I found It’s hell on earth. Everything that was forbidden in the hospital then came to me like a tidal wave. Everyone was using the internet! What a horrible way to live, and no God to heal them! I want to escape back to your shelter but there is no place for me in the world anymore!
“O God, if there is an afterlife, I want to live in a happy world where I am a good child.”
Such a suicide note lay silently on my desk.
In fact, I want to try to express a more realistic and absurd topic, which is essentially the rejection of new things by human beings. When computers were first introduced in China, many parents looked at their children who were keen on the Internet as if they were drug addicts. Some institutions took the opportunity to set up so-called Internet rehabs to give children electroshock treatment, forcing them to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the computer and associating them with fear, electroshock and computers together, to let children feel afraid when they see computers or mobile phones. But when the child comes out of the rehab facility and sees that society has now slowly accepted the internet, they will become fearful of society now and even want to escape back to the rehab, which I think is the darkest of all. All in all it is the use of violence to make you fear something to break your addiction, the ironical thing is that the whole society has slowly embraced these things, and finally find you are marginalized. So I wrote in diary form, over three years, about the changes in a child’s journey and what happened to him. Firstly, I wanted to portray the changes within the child, and secondly, I wanted to create a timeline to reflect the slow acceptance of internet culture by the public.