Everyone (I presume) has heard people refer to their digital device as a “crackberry.” This is meant to be a joke that disproves the reality, but when so many other smartphone users laugh a bit uncomfortably, the joke may be a little too apropos. According to a story in the New York Post today, several studies including a new one have revealed that people react to social media and Internet deprivation in ways very similar to how drug addicts respond to detox. I’ve been saying for years (following Marie Winn’s excellent book The Plug-In Drug) that technology like television is widely misunderstood for being primarily a matter of content rather than form. Social conservatives often lament the vulgarity of what’s on television, but almost no one ever laments the medium itself and its developmental impact on children and addiction-like use by adults. The question is whether we should start thinking of non-drug things in the same way we think about drugs. And in answering that question, it’s always useful to remember that at one time in history, cocaine and heroin were both legally available in some form to any customer. So, just because we don’t regulate something at the moment, that doesn’t mean later generations won’t think us fools for our blindness on such a matter.
~Do you ever use technology and then feel regret about it afterwards?
~Do you ever feel like you can’t stop using it or don’t really understand why you do use it so frequently?
~Is drunkenness a good paradigm for technology use? Is dependence?
~How careful should we be about new technology, especially when it seems to so suddenly become ubiquitous and seamlessly integrated into our lives?
~Is Twitter a drug? Is texting? Is facebook?
~Is the parallel with drugs strong enough to justify clear moral pronouncements?
~Are people being harmed in such a way that laws might even be passed for control…even beyond things like “don’t text and drive?”
~Is it only the action of texting that matters or is texting itself an intoxicant aside from its distraction effects?
~Does the fact that drugs cost a lot of money whereas much of modern technology is free affect your answers?
~Does the fact that drugs have direct and adverse biological effects compared to technology affect your answers?
Links
Addicts caught in the net (NY Post)
1 comment:
About technology as a drug. . . I see some similarities with an article from the Fall 2004-Winter 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-of-egocasting . It addresses similar topics in relation to cable TV, the remote control, the DVR, etc. - Before the smartphone - or at least in the very early days.
That author writes:
"What ties all these technologies together is the stroking of the ego. When cable television channels began to proliferate in the 1980s, a new type of broadcasting, called “narrowcasting,” emerged—with networks like MTV, CNN, and Court TV catering to specific interests. With the advent of TiVo and iPod, however, we have moved beyond narrowcasting into “egocasting”—a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear."
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