Among the most dangerous diseases are those that progress little by little, without the sick person noticing what is happening. 

One of those diseases, new as the technique, is to live addictively in the world of the Internet.

When you spend hours and hours in the virtual world, when you are more interested in reading, commenting, creating, consuming, betting, listening, seeing, always glued to the screen, up to the point that he suffers from family life, studies are gradually left aside, the head of work discovers the ineffectiveness of the worker, there are even fewer hours of sleep, is that the disease has already advanced a lot. 

If, moreover, the Internet is associated with other diseases, such as addiction to pornography or compulsive gambling, even with gambling, or obsessive fixations on certain arguments that lead to distorting the correct way of assessing people and facts, the victim can lead to extremely serious situations. 

There are already studies and warning signs of this danger. It is not enough, however, to diagnose the disease and establish more or less effective healing strategies. Preventive actions are essential so that children, adolescents, young people or adults do not succumb to this new form of addiction. 

Preventive measures include creating and maintaining a healthy life of relationships. If you live at ease as a family, if you really know how to welcome and feel welcomed, it will be much harder to lock yourself in the room or flee to an internet café to immerse yourself in the almost infinite world of the Internet.

Another measure that helps a lot is to learn to use the Internet as it is: an instrument with many possibilities, which allows access to immense spaces of culture, but which deserves to be used with measure. The "moral" of Quixote, in a way, is used for this new space open to human culture. 

To do this, family and school can do a lot to help new generations. It's not just about controlling the time a kid spends in front of the screen, it's about guiding him to use that time productively and in view of specific goals. From such goals, it will be possible to avoid what some call "internet wrecks", which begin at the beginning occasionally but can, little by little, trap more fragile personalities until dragging them into more or less severe forms of addiction. 

The Internet has burst hard into the modern world, as at the dawn of the modern age made the world of printed text increasingly powerful. Knowing how to control the powers of the new instrument will avoid the danger of succumbing to their strength (as succumbed, according to Tolkien's novel, those who wore the ring of power), and will allow a healthy use of their possibilities for the personal, family and community good.