Plenty of people used to get addicted to TV/Radio and before that, to going to libraries or hanging out in special social scenes (um... church?).

The internet is what you make of it. It's a library. It's a support group. It's a news source. It's a soap opera. It's a soap box. It's porn. It is all of these things and more, all at once, 24/7/365 and it is getting updated every freakin' Nth of a second.

Why would anyone with even a hint of real intellectual curiosity NOT find that addicting?

Any time, day or night, you get the urge to find out about something it would never occur to you to find out about, you can not only find something out, but you can almost instantaneously find people who will be happy to explain whatever it is at great length.

The fact that Google, in particular, works so goddam hard to find a match for any random jumble of keystrokes means that there's effectively endless supply of WTF for you, since you'll never be able to read every single interesting web page that pops up over the course of a day, much less every page that already exists, much less everything that will be generated over the rest of your lifetime.

The continuous confrontation with the unknown which the internet offers helps humble us and put what we know in the larger Confucian perspective of the vastness of what we don't know. I think that's probably not such a bad thing to which to become habituated.

Honestly... have you ever seen these pictures before?

images.google.com/images

Should you care whether or not you know what that is?

I don't know. But you can always check the ESPN website if you think that might be more important, I guess...