Don’t touch my Internet!

Cut off their connection to the web and people have moments of "withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness", according to a report released this week by Yahoo.

Dubbed -- and we're not making this up -- the Internet Deprivation Study, the Yahoo-sponsored research tried to get a group of consumers to stay offline, then report back.

Nearly half couldn't take the web-less world for more than two weeks, and the median time participants could go without logging on was a measly five days.

"It was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the internet for two weeks," said Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's chief sales officer, in a statement.

Those in the study described their offline time as "feeling left out of the loop," reported Yahoo, having to "resist temptation" to check out the web and missing their "private escape time" during the day.

Among the other finds of the deprivation study were that participants felt that they were at a disadvantage over those still online when it came to finding lower prices, that they were cut off from their outer circle of friends (those they typically kept in touch with via email and instant messaging) and believed they looked "lazy" to co-workers when they resorted to traditional means of communication or news gathering such as talking on the telephone or reading a printed newspaper.