When computers and the Internet appeared and started to gain ground, penetration stood in the center of investigations, the most common aspect of the approach was about accessibility versus inaccessibility. However, the participants at the conference called The Lifelong Learning and New Technologies Gap held in 1999 at theUniversityofPennsylvaniaremarked that the exclusive utilization of this dichotomous difference-inducing dimension has no validity. The simple indices of availability might be considerably misleading and be influenced by several economical and cognitive factors. This change in attitude soon seeped into researches, and besides accessibility more and more investigations dealt with the presence and absence of skills necessary for using tools, and the issues analyzing the aim, content and quality of use became vital, as well.

Within the researches the investigation of negative consequences gained high priority, since apart from the numerous positive aspects of the expanding technology new types of deviations had appeared, especially amongst the young. Scientific publications spoke about Internet addiction as early as at the late nineties, a notion that was defined through the length of Internet use by the first researches. Chebbi (2000) put the maximum healthy dosage of Internet use at 19 hours per week; however, according to Young (1998), those people may be considered addicts who spend at least 38 hours a week or 8 hours a day on the Internet. Nevertheless, Xu and their colleagues (2012) made it clear that it is not enough to investigate the length of time spent with the Internet to find out whether someone is an addicted user. Apart from the quantity indices quality features might bear some importance too, therefore, beyond examining the time spent in front of the Internet, it is also necessary to disclose the impact the medium has on personal relationships and free-time habits.

Yet, finding the definition and clarifying the theoretical bases of “Internet Addiction” caused some problems and generated fierce debates during the investigations. This is why in line with the diversity of approaches several different scales have been developed to measure Internet addiction. It is known from Laconi’s study (2014) that the most popular of these are the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) and the Problematic Internet Use Scale (PIUS). These tests, however, always approach addiction on theoretical bases, they do not examine its manifestations realized in actual activities.

Despite all these, there are few measuring tools at present that would start by measuring the skills needed to use the Internet. The most widely-known of these is the list of questions used by Eurostat, in which six task groups were established in relation to Internet use in order to classify the respondents based on their use of the Internet. Researchers examine how many of these tasks the participants can carry out and based on their responses they are classified into three groups: people with low-, medium- and high-level Internet use skills.

The measuring tool assembled by us (intelemetric.unideb.hu) has improved this activity-centered approach by mixing it with the formerly used aspects and the current practice. The document contains questions whose answers can determine with the help of a hundred point scale the degree of importance the Internet plays in a person’s life. This numerical value is the so called “Intelemetric Number”, with the assistance of which all persons may be delegated to a group out of five: beginner, basic, advanced, networked, addicted.

The poster we intend to present does not only wish to introduce the measuring tool to the audience but we are also determined to reveal the findings and experiences that came to life during the implementation of this new tool.

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