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Loading... Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping…| 485 | 13 | 44,702 | 
(3.77) | 4 | "An urgent and expert investigation into behavioral addiction, the dark flipside of today's unavoidable digital technologies, and how we can turn the tide to regain control. Behavioral addiction may prove to be one of the most important fields of social, medical, and psychological research in our lifetime. The idea that behaviors can be being addictive is new, but the threat is near universal. Experts are just beginning to acknowledge that we are all potential addicts. Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, is at the cutting edge of research into what makes these products so compulsive, and he documents the hefty price we're likely to pay if we continue blindly down our current path. People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, such as Instagram, Netflix, and Facebook--inventions that we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their extraordinary appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end. Tracing the very notion of addiction through history right up until the present day, Alter shows that we're only just beginning to understand the epidemic of behavioral addiction gripping society. He takes us inside the human brain at the very moment we score points on a smartphone game, or see that someone has liked a photo we've posted on Instagram. But more than that, Alter heads the problem off at the pass, letting us know what we can do to step away from the screen. He lays out the options we have address this problem before it truly consumes us. After all, who among us has struggled to ignore the ding of a new email, the next episode in a TV series, or the desire to play a game just one more time? Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink:And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behaveis available in paperback from Penguin"--… (more) |
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Information from the Russian Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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For Sara and Sam  | |
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At an Apple event in January 210, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. - Prologue A couple of years ago, Kevin Holesh, an app developer, decided that he wasn't spending enough time with his family. | |
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Addictive tech is part of the mainstream in a way that addictive substances never will be. Abstinence isn’t an option, Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day—and many far longer. Each month almost one hundred hours was lost to checking email, texting, playing games, surfing the web, reading articles, checking bank balances, and so on. Over the average lifetime, that amounts to a staggering eleven years. On average they were also picking up their phones about three times an hour. This sort of overuse is so prevalent that researchers have coined the term “nomophobia” to describe the fear of being without mobile phone contact (an abbreviation of “no-mobile-phobia”). Phones are disruptive by their mere existence, even when they aren’t in active use. They’re distracting because they remind us of the world beyond the immediate conversation, and the only solution, the researchers wrote, is to remove them completely. ...behavior is addictive only if the rewards it brings now are eventually outweighed by damaging consequences. 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. In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds. (According to Microsoft, a goldfish, by comparison, has an average attention span of nine seconds.) Empathy can’t flourish without immediate feedback, and it’s a very slow-developing skill. One analysis of seventy-two studies found that empathy has declined among college students between 1979 and 2009. They’re less likely to take the perspective of other people, and show less concern for others. Sluggishness is the enemy of addiction, because people respond more sharply to rapid links between action and outcome. ...addiction embeds itself in memory. Location isn’t the only factor that influences your chances of becoming an addict, but it plays a much bigger role than scientists once thought. Genetics and biology matter as well, but we’ve recognized their role for decades. What’s new, and what only became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, is that addiction is a matter of environment, too. Even the sturdiest of our ranks—the young G.I.s who were free of addiction when they left for Vietnam—are prone to weakness when they find themselves in the wrong setting. And even the most determined addicts-in-recovery will relapse when they revisit the people and places that remind them of the drug. ...a matter of learning that the addictive cue—a game, a place paired with heroin, or a small metal bar—treats loneliness, disaffection, and distress. Addiction, to Peele, is “an extreme, dysfunctional attachment to an experience that is acutely harmful to a person, but that is an essential part of the person’s ecology and that the person cannot relinquish.” That’s how he defined it decades ago, and that’s how he sees it today. The “experience” is everything about the context: the anticipation of the event, and the behavior of carefully lining up the needle, the charred spoon, and the lighter. Even heroin—an addictive substance if ever there was one—makes its way to the body via a chain of behaviors that themselves become part of the addiction. Addicts weren’t people who happened to like the drugs they were taking—they were people who wanted those drugs very badly even as they grew to dislike them for destroying their lives. Once people want a drug, it’s nearly permanent—it lasts at least a year in most people, and may last almost a whole lifetime.” Berridge’s ideas explain why relapse is so common. Even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to want the drug. Addictions aren’t driven by substances or behaviors, but by the idea, learned across time, that they protect addicts from psychological distress. Humans are driven by a sense of progress, and progress is easier to perceive when the finish line is in sight. In reality, 70 percent of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving. This is hugely disruptive: by one estimate, it takes up to twenty-five minutes to become re-immersed in an interrupted task. If you’re minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy. Beginner’s luck is addictive because it shows you the pleasure of success and then yanks it away. It gives you unrealistic ambitions and the high expectations of a more seasoned competitor. Your second dose of success is a mirage that seems nearer than it actually is, and the sense of loss that mounts with each new failure drives you ever harder till you recapture that early (and undeserved) sense of glory. The sense of creating something that requires labor and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioral addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioral addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or spend more time at work, and so you’ll struggle ever harder to shake the need to continue. ...children learn best, and are most motivated, when the material they’re learning is just beyond the reach of their current abilities. In the classroom context, this means a teacher guides them to clear the hurdle presented by the task, but not so heavy-handedly that they feel their existing skills weren’t useful in reaching the task’s solution. Near wins like these, where you’re sure you’re close to winning despite falling just short, are very addictive—in fact, often more so than genuine wins. ...the Zeigarnik Effect was born: incomplete experiences occupy our minds far more than completed ones. A cliffhanger only lasts until you know whether the bus plunges, a waiter only remembers an order until the plate reaches his customer, and the fate of a mobster from suburban New Jersey remains interesting only as long as you don’t know whether he lives or dies. When the rewards were unpredictable, participants enjoyed them that much more—and continued to enjoy them through to the end of the experiment. Each new reward followed its own micro-cliffhanger, and the thrill of waiting made the entire experience more pleasurable for a longer period of time. Conservative, religious states tend to endorse traditional sexual values while they discourage open and hedonistic attitudes to sexuality, which are far more accepted in liberal, secular states. One consequence of condemning open sexuality in public is that sexual expression goes underground. People from conservative states with traditional views of sexuality are more likely to subscribe to online pornography services. And according to two Canadian psychologists, it’s the people from conservative, religious states who search for porn-related terms more often. There is one subtle psychological lever that seems to hasten habit formation: the language you use to describe your behavior. Suppose you were trying to avoid using Facebook. Each time you’re tempted, you can either tell yourself “I can’t use Facebook,” or you can tell yourself “I don’t use Facebook.” They sound similar, and the difference may seem trivial, but it isn’t. “I can’t” wrests control from you and gives it to an unnamed outside agent. It’s disempowering. You’re the child in an invisible relationship, forced not to do something you’d like to do, and, like children, many people are drawn to whatever they’re not allowed to do. In contrast, “I don’t” is an empowering declaration that this isn’t something you do. It gives the power to you and signals that you’re a particular kind of person—the kind of person who, on principle, doesn’t use Facebook. The first principle of behavioral architecture, then, is very simple: whatever’s nearby will have a bigger impact on your mental life than whatever is farther away. Despite the sense that things have changed in the past, we also tend to believe that they’ll stop changing—that we and the lives we lead right now will remain this way forever. This is known as the end of history illusion, and it happens in part because it’s much easier to see the real changes between ten years ago and today than it is to imagine how different things will be ten years in the future. The illusion is comforting, in a way, because it makes us feel that we’ve finished becoming who we are, and that life will remain as it is forever. At the same time, it prevents us from preparing for the changes that are yet to come. It is possible to create a product or experience that is indispensable but not addictive. Workplaces, for example, can shut down at six—and with them work email accounts can be disabled between midnight and five the next morning. Games, like books with chapters, can be built with natural stopping points. Social media platforms can “demetricate,” removing the numerical feedback that makes them vehicles for damaging social comparison and chronic goal-setting. Children can be introduced to screens slowly and with supervision, rather than all at once. Our attitude to addictive experiences is largely cultural, and if our culture makes space for work-free, game-free, screen-free downtime, we and our children will find it easier to resist the lure of behavioral addiction. | |
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In its place, we'll communicate with one another directly, rather than through devices, and the glow of these social bonds will leave us richer and happier than the glow of screens ever could. (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions "An urgent and expert investigation into behavioral addiction, the dark flipside of today's unavoidable digital technologies, and how we can turn the tide to regain control. Behavioral addiction may prove to be one of the most important fields of social, medical, and psychological research in our lifetime. The idea that behaviors can be being addictive is new, but the threat is near universal. Experts are just beginning to acknowledge that we are all potential addicts. Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, is at the cutting edge of research into what makes these products so compulsive, and he documents the hefty price we're likely to pay if we continue blindly down our current path. People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, such as Instagram, Netflix, and Facebook--inventions that we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their extraordinary appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end. Tracing the very notion of addiction through history right up until the present day, Alter shows that we're only just beginning to understand the epidemic of behavioral addiction gripping society. He takes us inside the human brain at the very moment we score points on a smartphone game, or see that someone has liked a photo we've posted on Instagram. But more than that, Alter heads the problem off at the pass, letting us know what we can do to step away from the screen. He lays out the options we have address this problem before it truly consumes us. After all, who among us has struggled to ignore the ding of a new email, the next episode in a TV series, or the desire to play a game just one more time? Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink:And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behaveis available in paperback from Penguin"-- ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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That you have a slight addiction to that game your niece installed on your iPad?
That your shopping tendencies, such harmless fun to you, may be controlled by invisible strings?
Welcome to the modern world, where behavioral addictions are surging far past chemical ones.
Adam Alter tells you about the history of addiction (from the hapless inventor of Coca-Cola to today's World of Warcraft, where you're lucky if you manage to will yourself to take a break to use the bathroom or sleep) leaving no stone unturned (hello, Sigmund Freud, you big promoter of the wholesome values of cocaine!) in the new field of behavioral addiction. (