Adam Alter

Pre-pandemic attack on the designers of addictive tech, especially our phones. Makes much of the fact that many Silicon Valley parents don’t let their kids use devices: “Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?” The core point is that individual willpower isn’t very helpful when there are thousands of entities whose success depends on breaking down individual willpower; the deck is very much stacked against the individual.

The show more particular behavioral addiction of being glued to our devices may be harming our—and our kids’—attention spans and empathy. (Although as someone who has never liked eye contact, I found the attack on not making consistent eye contact/criticism of how webcams deter direct gaze a bit ableist.) Alter considers online social interaction to be not “the real thing” (e.g., gamers “build simulated friendships that almost look and feel like the real thing”), which my experience of fandom suggests is far from the whole story, but he is not very interested in whether you can have the good of online connection without having the bad. I don’t disagree that there are a lot of ills that online interactions can make worse, but consider the contradictions in this account: He discusses a center that treats so-called gaming/online-induced “intimacy disorders,” the result of which is that men “don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together.” But: The center no longer admits women because “we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule.” So, you know, it was intimacy but not real intimacy, not the right kind of intimacy.

And for real get off my lawn energy: “Kids of the 1990s and earlier stored dozens of phone numbers in their heads; they interacted with each other rather than with devices; and they made their own fun instead of extracting manufactured fun from ninety-nine cent apps.” I have my issues with Clay Shirky, but I remember growing up in the 1980s and his response to this argument is perfect: “Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don’t? I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.” Our current situation seems to me genuinely catastrophic, but Fox News has at least as much if not more to do with that in the US, and Alter seems uninterested in making distinctions in evidence. For example, he treats one expert’s recommendation that kids “should be allowed to watch passive TV till they reach elementary school—around age seven—when they should be introduced to interactive media, like iPads” as “agree[ing]” with the American Academy of Pediatrics that “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2,” which is not the same thing. Interestingly, Alter is much more ambivalent about gamification (making tasks more like games), which he concludes is not inherently good or bad, but depends on what else is going on.

But if you really want to change your online habits, he does collate what seems like useful information for making a behavior change into a real habit. show less

Gusta mucho cuando en vez de ir a lo fácil y focalizarse en un caso concreto y deambular con divagaciones repetitivas sin parar, se trate un tema tan candente desde diversos puntos de vista, diferentes enfoques, con un desarrollo tan didáctico y con casuísticas relacionadas, pero cada una con sus particularidades que entroncan con un tema tan de actualidad como las adicciones a la tecnología. Que más que otra cosa son mucho de desahogo a las ansiedades y los problemas emocionales de show more personas como cualquiera, dificultades entendibles, pero que tienen el peligro de activar la necesidad de alivio y luego llegan los comportamientos aprendidos que no permiten tener una vida plena sin penalizar el desarrollo de uno. Las adicciones de comportamiento como las termina llamando Alter. Y también que no tiene miedo a dar visiones contradictorias con datos y estudios probados, además que toda la información psicológica y las soluciones posibles dan pautas para intentar sobrellevar mejor o incluso erradicar algunos comportamientos nocivos, también alentar la analogización de muchas cosas, señalar la obsesión por los excesivos números que nos evitan ser conscientes de nuestros límites (por ejemplo en el deporte) o la nula necesidad de cuantificar la aceptación de forma vacía con visitas y likes. Entre muchas más cosas que hacen de este libro una lectura amena, lo suficientemente ilustrativa y completa, además de bien pensada como estudio de un problema actual dirigido al gran público. show less

A little chilling in that modern tech seems to be about fostering addiction and finding ways to keep us obsessively connected. I've seen traces of this among people I know who respond to every ping of their phone like a lab rat or feel bad about themselves in relation to the posts of others on social media. Alter's premise that this is engineered by tech's creators is the chilling part. Where this seems really insidious is among children who have such widespread access to devices, especially show more with their implementation in schools in place of textbooks. Noteworthy: "Online interactions aren't just different than real-world interactions; they're measurably worse. Humans learn empathy and understanding by watching how their actions effect other people. Empathy can't flourish without immediate feedback and it's a very slow-developing skill." (40) Cloak those actions behind anonymity and there is big concern for human interaction. Some of the main ways technology hooks us is with cliffhangers, gamification, looping, positive reinforcement (likes on Facebook, for example), and escalation of challenges, all tapping into intrinsic human behaviors and triggering the pleasure center in the brain. Informative and not as doomsday as it would seem, this book's primary goal is to explain behavioral addiction: "Addiction is a deep attachment to an experience that is harmful and difficult to do without. Behavioral addictions don't involve eating, drinking, injection or smoking substances. They arise when a person can't resist a behavior, which despite addressing a deep psychological need in the short-term, produces significant harm in the long term. Obsession and compulsion are close relatives...." (20) and then to point out how it is triggered by the ever-present technology around us. Definitely scientifically accessible, Alter explains things with myriad research examples and anecdotes in layman's terms. Worth a read for the awareness it provokes and the alternatives it explores, though would have liked a little more of the latter. Balance helps: "Harmonious passions 'make life worth living' but an obsessive passion plagues the mind." (22) show less

A really interesting yet short read about how technology has changed to keep us hooked as the technology has become more mobile and ever present in our lives.

I wanted to read this book because recently I have been trying to step away from my phone more and be off the internet more because I have found it to stress me out. I recently deleted Instagram, which is the only social media I had. It is a decision that I have not regretted for a moment. I thought this book may help me flesh out show more ideas of why being on the internet and being on social media was so stressful for me.

This book did help with that by covering a broad range of topics under the umbrella of behavioral addiction. It focused a little more on gaming that I would have liked just because I don't play really any sort of video game. I wish there had been a bit more focus on social media behavior because that is what I have found most addiction when it comes to technology. I also really liked the section on raising children because its a topic I think about a lot when think about my childhood and how important offline play was for my growth and how different it might be growing up today.

I do wish the author had acknowledged a bit more how hard it is socially to be disconnected for days at a time. It was brought up how ubiquitous technology is but people who took days to answer emails or phone calls were spoken of fondly without the author ever really acknowledging that not everyone's job allows them to disconnect like that. Many jobs have a requirement that emails are responded to within 24 hours so many people cannot afford to just turn off email notifications. I think it would have been good to acknowledge that unplugging like that can be the hardest for the people making the least amount of money and the people who can least afford to lose their job over a missed phone call or unanswered email.

I think if this is a topic you're interested in, I would recommend this book. It isn't overly preachy about the dangerous of technology and it doesn't tell you never to use your phone. Not all the information was new to me but this book does help to flesh out how technology has been designed to become more and more addictive and how users are studied to make it a product as addictive as possible.


Also! not about this book but I've now read 15 books in January! I'm particularly excited about this because last year I read 30 books the whole year and right now I'm already halfway to that in just one month. Even though I think this will slow down now that I'm back in school I'm hoping to read many more books this year and I hope I will enjoy a lot of them! show less