Passage 2

In China today, Internet addiction has acquired a symbolic function that isabout more than health. At Film Forum on August 6th, “Web Junkie,”by the Israeli filmmakers, takes us inside an Internet-addiction treatment center in Beijing to chronicle the ways in which technology, wealth, and autonomy are altering the ties between young people and the elders who strain to comprehend those changes.Jim is a sixteen-year-old who was playing World of Warcraft ten hours a day by the time his parents gave up on him. In a series of powerful scenes in counseling sessions, we watch a family failing under the pressures of work and expectation. His father, a thin, quiet man, admits to beating his son and trying to stab him “just to scare”him into obedience, before admitting that they have no way to communicate. “It’s worse than talking to a stranger,”the father says. The son threatens suicide. “At home, I feel I don't exist,? he tells his parents, trying to explain why he escaped into the emotional refuge of a vast online world. “On the Internet, I have friends who care about me,” he says. A moment later, with little provocation, he picks up a metal stool and asks his father, “Do you want to die?”The most revealing moments in “Web Junkie”have little to do with the Internet or addiction; they are about private, perceptual changes within families, as young Chinese men and their parents struggle with questions of individuality, personal freedom, self-development, and trust. Many of the parents seem to be loving but preoccupied, and they would prefer to pin their troubles on mysterious new technologies than on the underlying causes of their children’s distress. The parents, raised in another China, have no way to relate to their children, and littletime to try. In one scene, a clinician places phone calls to parent after parent, trying in vain to persuade them to leave work and accompany their children in treatment. In a final reunion scene, parents greet their children awkwardly as a voice through a loudspeaker advises, “Parents, hug your kids.”Professor Tao Ran, the founder of the center and a pioneer in Web-addiction treatment in China, is a particularly surprising character. At first, he is cast as the quack (冒牌医生)exclaiming about the Web as“digital heroin.” But then he addresses a room full of parents and describes, insightfully, that a generation of only children, who face narrowing job prospects and heavy pressure to support their aging parents, present a challenge that China has never faced. “Do you know how lonely your kids are?” he asks. “So where do they look for friends? The Internet.”“Web Junkie”does not end with any tidy answers. The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to demographic imbalance between men and women. Even for those who are growing up with more prosperity and autonomy than their parents ever imagined, the Web is an escape from reality. In one scene, a kid is sitting patiently while a technician fits his head with a peculiar bonnet made of rubber tubing and wires. “Close your eyes and think about something happy”the clinician says. Asked, upon his departure, what he learned at the Chinese Teenagers Mental Growth Center, one young man shrugs and says, “How to escape.”

Which of the following is closest in meaning to the phrase “Web Junkie”?