Internet Addiction

A Critical Psychology of Users

Emaline Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429508998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Web Development
• Index: Computer Science

This essential book questions the psychological construct of Internet Addiction by contextualizing it within the digital technological era. It proposes a critical psychology that investigates user subjectivity as a function of capitalism and imperialism, arguing against punitive models of digital excesses and critiquing the political economy of the Internet affecting all users.

Friedman explores the limitations of individual-centered remediations exemplified in the psychology of internet addiction. Furthermore, Friedman outlines the self-creative actions of social media users, and the data processing that exploits them to urge psychologists to politicize rather than pathologize the effects of excessive net use. The book develops a notion of capitalist imperialism of the social web and studies this using the radical methods of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

By synthesizing perspectives on digital life from sociology, economics, digital media theory, and technology studies for psychologists, this book will be of interest to academics and students in these areas, as well as psychologists and counselors interested in addressing Internet Addiction as a collective, societal ill.

1

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

When I first began thinking about addiction, I was not thinking about addiction to the Internet. I became involved in twelve-step programs by my addict father’s belief that I should use it to cure a sudden and comparatively short-lived bout of anorexia by going through the program. He fashioned me as addicted to deprivation, a formulation that gripped me. Especially given its paradoxical quality, I found this mode of treatment too compelling not to test out. What I found was not extraordinary – a room of the unfortunate, not unlike the televised representations one sees in passing. Stories are shared, donations are made, and the refrain persists: “Hi, I’m whoever, and I’m an alcoholic.” This facet gripped me, too. How is it that admission, or submission (as it appeared to me at the time), holds the key to greater agency?

I type “agency” pointedly, with a touch of mockery. One must not be fooled into believing that this confers a greater sense of control (self- or otherwise). It is precisely giving up control, handing it over to one’s “higher power” that enables one to get a handle on the so-called disease of addiction. On the one hand, there would seem to be a sort of magic of language at play: a performative insistence, like a ritual or rite, which enacts a critical reflexive function sufficient for change. On the other, there is a community of addicts who use this term as a social currency that defines inclusion and belonging, heralding exactly those things sought by the addict – those things for which drugs and alcohol, psychological thinkers will tell us, are impoverished substitutions. In twelve-step meetings, one sees the dynamics of power via subjection play out, not in any theater of social or political power, but entirely within the locus of the self. Gregory Bateson (2000) characterized this fix long ago as changing the structure of pride endemic to addicts. Where alcoholism is placed outside the self, “I can resist drinking,” the twelve-step program relocates alcoholism within the self. It is a solution offered along the lines of imaginary identification with a disease entity that preys on this self. This identification has the dual function of forming individuals, modeled on Western liberal political subjects of internality, and then directing their behavior. In the case of twelve-step programs, the behavior is directed away from the drug-object, whatever it may be.

Today one can play out the role of the mental health professional by characterizing any experience of excess or dependency as an addiction. My abbreviated story above, along with the thirty-six adaptations of the steps for different drugs indexed by Wikipedia, testify to this normative understanding. It seems possible to offer up any human phenomenon to the implicitly psychological-institutional mode of social life. In the case of addiction, addicts are often sold another fix, like a retreat, mindfulness training, hypnosis, or Methadone (as in treatment for addiction to heroin). Community-run twelve-step groups stand as a rare, grassroots exception, though their structure and logic are commonly layered with other more individually targeted components of treatment by psy-professionals.

Psychology was formulated to carry out extremely specific policing functions in the Anglophone world, with a model of mental health that has since also spread its style of understanding human beings to the global South. While diagnoses and their logic have permeated the globe, they have again plunged deeper into the body, with a swelling scope of influence over increased facets of human life. For example, in Glow Kids (2017), Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Harvard psychologist and CEO of “Maui Recovery” in Hawaii, looks at how “age-inappropriate screen tech” is ravaging an entire “iGen” – the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones. Neuroscientific discourses typically have the last word on “addiction creep,” when images of the brain show that glowing screens are as stimulating and “dopaminergic” (dopamine activating) to the brain’s pleasure centers as sex or drugs more widely acknowledged to be addictive. Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can.

Whether attributed from outside or incorporated intentionally by the subject of psychological diagnoses, the diagnostic label acts as a social currency that affords access to these treatment options. This is a double-edged sword when one considers the barrage of stigmatizing cultural associations it also carries from centuries of staunch disciplining of drug users by various government agencies. Many critically-minded characterizations of the current explosion of addiction pathologies, like Internet and Social Media Addiction, highlight how these discourses produced top-down restraints on life, calling them “civilizing technolog[ies]” (Vrecko, 2010), or “medicalization[s] of deviance” (Schneider, 1978). Such characterizations unsettle and de-naturalize addiction pathologies through genealogical accounts of its production through the intersections of science, psychology, and public policy (see also Christensen, 2015). In America, drug-taking has been intermittently seen as a form of protest, rebellion, artistry, sociality, criminality, illness, and experimentation. Foucault (1965), among many others (see Levine, 1978), links the late-19th century medico-juridical discourse of “toxicomania” to the mania operating in the hierarchizing science of types that attempted to order the elements of the world following their functions (rather than their forms). The taxonomic impulse that characterized and formed the human and biological scientific discourses created the conditions for the psychopathological entity “addiction” to emerge alongside medical, judicial, and social institutions (i.e., welfare).

Recently the World Health Organization added digital gaming disorder to the 11th revision of the ICD (Gaebel et al., 2017) and the APA recategorizing non-substance related behaviors, like internet gambling, together with substance-use disorders in the DSM (Potenza, 2014). It is not only Psychology that responds to the large-scale social changes wrought by ubiquitous digital communication. Owing, perhaps, to the massively widespread phenomenon that is the Internet, the barrage of voices outside of psychology concerned with excessive use of the Internet, particularly social media, hearken back to this pre-psy-industrial history, even as it imports its concepts. News outlets like CBS and NBC foment this discourse, citing anecdotal self-reports, buffeted by scant, early-stage neurological research, to proclaim that users are no match for the tantalizing pleasures of the net-connected screen that hijacks users’ brains. Supporting their outcry with analogical reasoning, psychological experiments point to the similarity between the brains of World of Warcraft addicts, slot machine players, and heroin addicts as they are preparing to play or to inject.

In early 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, George Soros joined the ranks of high-profile businessmen who criticized the harmful effects of major Internet platforms (Solon, 2018). There, even early investors of Facebook, the chunk of the Net this text focuses on, wondered what the platform does to “our children’s brains,” flirting with the notion that its growth could be considered a threat to public health (McNamee, 2017). The problem of screen time even made it onto the democratic debate stage in the early days of 2020 United States presidential campaigning. Screen time is easily politicized in its linkage to fear of a nonhuman, “mechanistic” creep, portrayed in movies like Terminator (Daly et al., 1984) and I, Robot (Baron et al., 2004). These movies typically end with robots and intelligent machines, forming a new sort of violent or hyper-conscious revolution capable of taking over or overthrowing human domination of the natural world. Such fear makes an excellent campaign platform in a cultural climate where managerial fantasies of humans’ replacement by fully obedient, laboring machines are repeatedly presented as a new horizon of capitalism.

Responses from the tech sector include suggestions by other executives that its major platforms be regulated just like cigarette companies. Note that these responses take addictiveness and the addiction paradigm for granted (Hern, 2018). And the companies have responded with suites of tools like the Time Well Spent initiative, meant to help individuals monitor their social media use. Just like methadone treatments for heroin, the irony is that a new net-connected application trains you away from the old one. The brain disease model of addiction finds a correlate in the tracking and monitoring functions of such apps, where the whole user (rather than the brain taken in isolation) must be notified, nudged, and discouraged from engaging with the mobile phone or social platform - once they appease the tracking app, that is. Public sector responses have considered measures like the “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act” (or the SMART Act, for short). Recall, again, that this pathological entity is not recognized by Psychology’s DSM, but easily gains recognition before the United States Congress. In this act, Congress finds that the business model of many social media companies is to capture as much of their user’s attention as possible – a goal that exploits the brain physiology and human psychological vulnerabilities of users by design. These responses have created even more radical calls for closing Pandora’s box. Social media, some say, should simply not exist at all.

Even outside of the psy-institutions, concern about screen time, social media addiction, and theft of the user’s free choice are voiced from the outside looking in, even as the high-powered individuals in the technology and public sectors are undoubtedly users themselves. The excessive use of anything socially considered to be a “drug,” however well-meaning, subjects it to the question of management and administration of a subject of pathological enjoyment. It is as if a whole chorus of concern chimes in, joining psychology’s task through their own means. In the case of the Internet, it would seem that psychologists, care workers, lifestyle coaches, health gurus, politicians, business executives, the World Health Organization, Alcoholics Anonymous fanatics, or really any player interested in human well-being might be motivated to (and likely equally unsuccessful at) intervening in this presumed problem of consumption.

In its evocative capacity, scholars have even turned to Internet Addiction to understand how the average citizen thinks about the Internet as a threat to their family, their peace of mind, and their way of life (Manjikian, 2016). Thus, as an object of discourse, Internet Addiction explores how we think about the function of the net and its impact on society at large. Likewise, this book seeks a critical understanding of excessive activity on the Internet, surveying scholarly expressions of concern about the automation of already-precarious jobs, obsolescence of other skills and abilities through the digitization of all parts of life, algorithms increasingly taking control of users’ experience of the world, and the general disorientation of radical social change owing to digitalism. These are some of the fear-based pathos that shrouds our orientation to the realities of what is in fact emerging on the Internet.

If psychologists and others are pointing out a psychical pandemic of sorts, might we need something more than a diagnostic label tethered to individual subjects? As it stands, the discourse of neuroscience and accompanying images of the brain are wielded in order to locate addiction squarely within the heads of individual persons. Such delimited stigma is a manifestation of psychological institutions’ maintenance of the myth of the “individual,” on whom it relies to peddle its services. I begin with a brief look at how addictive disorders in general and Internet Addiction in particular are deployed within psychology as a diagnostic category. Internet Addiction concerns a problem of excess enjoyment related to the use of the Internet, as identified in psychological research and beyond. Yet, this grafting onto the Internet the diagnostic markers of addiction is a highly problematic overgeneralization of the addiction category, which itself mirrors the ballooning of the psychological industries and their simple, profit-driven templates for addressing a whole range of postmodern complaints and ascriptions of abnormality.

Given the meeting of addiction discourses and mounting awareness of the social changes wrought from the Internet, the voices of concern about Internet Addiction extend far beyond the grips of psychology. The trans-disciplinary and even extra-academic imperative of this book comes from the object of study; neither the “addictification of society” (Loose, 2015) nor its digitization, pay much attention to the siloing of knowledge production as a form of violence against thought. Against the ever-expanding umbrella of addiction labeling, I argue that it is not habit per se that is problematic. In fact, philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1994) asserts that habit is the foundation from which all other psychic phenomena derive. Instead, I address a crucial paradox of Internet Addiction related to the historical usage of the signifier “addiction” and the recent, total shift it has undergone. Where addictions have generally called out an “anti-social” form of enjoyment, Internet Addiction is precisely a form of enjoyment too enraptured in the dominant mode of sociality of the global society which it creates. The current construction of Internet Addiction, however inadvertently, undercuts the reality, the social necessity, of participating in a globally connected world. It stigmatizes such dependence which, contrary to other “addictions,” is based in human interdependence.

This is a form of technofetishism to which psychology falls prey – the fallacy of objectifying the human relations that make up the Internet. The word used by theorists to describe the transformation of a social process into a thing is “reification” – (“thing-ification”) (Lukács & Livingstone, 2013). Reified as an object of addiction, the Internet’s specific qualities are never determined. In this key, the software, the algorithm, and the platform appear as supernatural forces for users and mental health professionals alike, who, generally speaking, prefer not to know what – or whose gaze – is under the hood. The construction of the Internet as a drug, therefore, is not only erroneous but threatens to sharply limit psychologists’ understanding of the Internet and its often-liberating affordances (especially for minoritarian social groups). The Internet here is a means of connection between actual people, which means its stigmatization pits the psychological individual against a collective of users. Moreover, with the Internet as the differentiated cultural milieu of global capitalism, psychology’s characterization of Internet Addicts as passive victims swept up in its clutches is a little-acknowledged cultural insensitivity, ignoring the active participation of users that gives the social web its value. The weight of this insensitivity falls disproportionately on those who grew up online – “digital natives.”

The piece then moves to an introduction of schizoanalysis, emphasizing a methodology particular to Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxian politics that I argue is especially useful in dealing with digital technologies and the society to which they increasingly refer. While schizoanalysis is a radically flexible methodology, in the context of this piece, it produces a selective mapping of the digital social body to elucidate a schematic understanding of the meaning of addiction to the Internet according to the social stratifications that it creates and the means by which they are created. Through a deep dive into social media companies, infrastructure, and assets, including users, we confront digital capitalism, its apparatuses of capture, and its methods of control in their present forms. This method, schizoanalysis, suggests that universal history is an affordance of the capitalist social system that the Internet (as we know it in its current iteration) creates and recreates continuously. This method also posits the requisite philosophical, and psychoanalytical principles through which the promotion of existential values and a politics of desire might proceed. A politics of desire is, firstly, able to address the paradox of Internet Addiction noted above, and secondly, apt for addressing the problematization of desire and assessing its material effects – what it produces, how, and to whose benefit and detriment.

Going back to the fix offered by twelve-step groups: In the array of individualizing treatments offered by mental health professionals, treatment-by-community is a radical idea not to be taken for granted. The curiosity of Internet Addiction is that the very place that “community” ostensibly lives today is “within” the drug, as it were – the form that community takes in contemporary capitalism. A community of Internet users is just that: using together in the place they have to be together based on the capitalist imperialism of the digital world, furthered and assuaged through digital technological means. Users have to be together in the double sense that the Internet is commonly understood as a cultural affordance that enables new forms of sociality and in the sense of a migration beneficial for the processes of global capitalism. Having an online presence is increasingly required for interaction with migrated and new social institutions, like schools, state entities, banks, and businesses. The grip of capitalism’s psychical and physical imperialism is therefore displaced onto the compelling drug-object and its sway over the unwitting (or ambivalent) psychologized subject of free will.

More and more of us have to be online, and migrant and nomadic users internalize bits and pieces of identities through practices of commercially bloated self-representation. The early days of the Internet cultivated a spirit of newfound freedom. Now, Internet-as-an-addiction directly contrasts any characterization of it (e.g. by social media companies) as a place of community. Even if one concedes that the Internet has drug-like properties, treating this problem individually and attempting to eliminate or moderate its use would still have the untenable consequence of extreme social exclusion for those so designated. The network structure of the organization that pervades trade, finance, business, and work rely on digitally mediated communication across long distances, use of complex computational instruments for processing massive quantities of data, and an eschewal of dominant frameworks of time or space in favor of labor that spreads across all other areas of life (Stalder, 2006). This networked style of connection also assumes a sort of proximity-of- everything that issues from the rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A brief take on “Internet Addiction” in psychology
• 3 Schizoanalysis, technology, and sociality
• 4 Users and technologies of self
• 5 Extraction machine of social media
• 6 Data collection and the relational factory
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index