Wednesday January 7 6:45 PM EST 

LIVEWIRE: Technostress Takes Its Toll On Internet Users

By Michelle V. Rafter 

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Technostress isn't just a textbook phenomenon for Byron McMillan.

Since the Wake Forest, N.C., seminarian started using the Internet last month, he claims he can't concentrate on anything for any significant period of time, including the sermons he pens.

"If I have a topic that I've decided to write about and I can't get the words flowing immediately, I lose interest and will be off to a Web site to see if I can find inspiration or a new idea," McMillan said.

An inability to focus is just one manifestation of a condition called technostress that researchers define as the negative effect of technology on people's thoughts, attitudes, behaviors and bodies.

Last month, I wrote about technostress in this column and received numerous e-mails from Internet users expressing how technostress affects their lives, often for the worse.

Michelle M. Weil and Larry D. Rosen, authors of the new book, "Technostress: Coping With Technology At Work, At Home, At Play," believe Internet users are especially susceptible because of the stress created by their high expectations of technology and the constant waiting they endure for online connections, e-mail and Web pages. (Published by J. Wiley & Sons, $22.95, http://www.technostress.com).

Other signs of technostress: lost productivity at work, changing sleeping hours or habits to spend more time online, insomnia, a constant urge to check e-mail, and losing your train of thought in work or conversation.

For Tim Whalen, a Coast Guard officer from New York City, technostress means feeling compelled to check his e-mail, even at 2 a.m.

"How could I possibly let an e-mail sit for another eight hours," Whalen wrote to me.

Whalen also complained, only half in jest, that his heavy Internet use is wreacking havoc on his grammar and punctuation.

"I seem to prefer the use of three dots ...," Whelan wrote. "Sometimes, I feel like a modern-day James Joyce as I type ... never completing a thought ... moving on from this to that in a techno-stream-of-consciousness..."

It's not her Internet use or her computer that bothers Catherine Dahle, an America Online user from Crookston, Minn. It's the way other people behave when they're online that makes her anxious.

"Many more men feel that it is alright to make gross sexual comments to women online than they ever would in the real world," Dahle wrote.

Dahle also believes people are too awed by technology and mistakenly feel they need to be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"It's funny," she wrote, "we have so many ways to communicate virtually, and yet there's more depression and anti-social behavior these days because of the lack of real human interaction and face-to-face" contact.

Technostress can affect kids as well as adults. Joe Knaeble, a 16-year-old from St. Charles, Mo., writes that after three years online he's afraid he's getting addicted.

"I find myself online all the time now," Knaeble wrote. "I don't want to be, so I force myself to go out and continue my running that I should be doing during the off-season for cross-country."

Not everyone agrees that the frequent interruptions of one's train of thought that technostress can bring are a bad thing.

New York City resident Marilyn Jacobs believes breaking from work to check e-mail for a few minutes here and there is rejuvenating, and in the long run, could make people more productive.

"Perhaps firms will institute e-mail breaks twice a day for 10 minutes like coffee breaks are sometimes offered," Jacobs wrote. "You can return to your work feeling fresh."

Regardless of how they feel about technology, people need to accept the fact that it's there to stay, and learn to live with it, wrote W. Craig Aulenbach, a Louisville, Ky., intellectual-property attorney.

"The bottom line is that this will be, regardless of what people think ought to be. It is a fact of life," Aulenbach wrote. "We have left the industrial society and made the leap into the information society. It will not be easy for many of us."

The best possible antidote for technostress, according to Janet Busener, an Atlanta photographer and America Online user, is a regular dose of the great outdoors.

"Everyone should be required to spend at least one weekend a month in the wilderness away from everything technical. Getting away camping or hiking is the best medicine," Busener wrote.

(Michelle V. Rafter writes about cyberspace and technology from Los Angeles. Reach her at mvrafter(at)deltanet.com. Opinions expressed in this column are her own.)