If you believe you are spending way too much time on the Internet this may not be an article you want to read.
According to ForensicPsychology.net, heavy Internet users are already about 2.5 times more likely to be depressed than those who stay away from it and the remaining figures the site is reporting are not helping to change that.
In a rather lengthy infographic, ForensicPsychology.net lists a collection of data how Internet usage is affecting our brain and behavior. The sheer amount of time we are spending on the Internet - the site says we are collectively using the Internet for 35 billion hours each month and 61 percent of us admit to be addicted to the Internet - causes us to consume too much information simultaneously, which results in stress and reduced thinking speed and creative ability.
Search engines such as Google are changing our learning behavior that does not necessarily train our brains. Rather than storing the actual information we are finding, we simply learn how to find that information again when we need it. The bottom line of the current trend is that the impact of the Internet reduces our brain's ability to transmit emotional, sensory, memory and speech signals by about 20 percent, ForensicPsychology.net claims.
people with depression are probably much more likely to stay at home, and what do you do at the house...sleep, eat, watch tv, and kill time on the computer.
to draw any type of reasonable conclusion, we'd have to have a study where low/non internet users (with no depressive tendencies, or a measured number) are encouraged to increase internet time, without altering other life aspects (tough to do...less irl time, less outside activities...that extra has to come from somewhere), then the subjects need to be tested for signs of depression again in a realistic amount of time.
the numbers here are interesting, but drawing conclusions from them is way to much guesswork without the ridiculous number of variables to consider.