In the years since Tiger Woods vanished into rehab, we’ve seen a rush of new kinds of addiction begin to surface and strengthen - namely, in the form of technology addictions. As smartphones begin to become more and more widely used, websites that once could hold our attention only when we had access to a computer and a wifi zone can now notify us anytime, anyplace. Facebook wall post? Notification. Private message? Notification. Retweet? Notification. Someone invited you to feed their cow in Farmville? Notification (albeit insanely underwhelming). Emails, blog updates, ebay countdowns… it’s all RIGHT THERE in our pockets, and it is turning us into addicted, hungry-for-more, notification-addled cyber-humans.
I know that I personally feel cut off when I go even a few hours without my iPod or phone (I should mention that I don’t even have a smart phone. I have a seriously old-school flip-phone that DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A CAMERA. Sheesh. But my iPod is a 4th generation touch, which means that I do have wifi capability - so I’m straddling that fine line between the technological yesteryear and the cyberhighways of tomorrow); I get this growing nervousness that someone MUST have tried to contact me, that things are HAPPENING out there, that the cyberworld with its rapid communications is PASSING ME BY as I chug along in the snail-slowness of realtime.
There seem to be two different sides to this technology addiction. First, there is an addiction to the notifications themselves, and to receiving them (preferably as MANY as techno-humanly possible); second, there is an addiction to the newsfeed, fueled by a fear of missing any new pieces of information.
The psychological attraction to receiving notifications, I imagine, is that they trigger a feeling of self-importance derived from the idea that having someone write on your facebook wall can be interpreted as a sort of proof of popularity. If a lot of people write on your wall, you are obviously important, well-loved; if no one writes on your wall, you are dandruff-girl (secret hero?) from The Breakfast Club. A fairly simplified interpretation, but which nevertheless lies at the heart of the addiction. Notifications that are less of a direct feedback on personal popularity (“So-and-so wrote on the wall of this group that you forgot you were a part of” or “some friend-of-a-friend commented on that status that you pity-liked earlier today” or, worst of all, the Farmville invite) are less welcome - there is the thrill at the sight of a notification, followed immediately by disappointment at its low personal value.
Image credit: memegenerator.net
To generate more notifications that make you feel like a validated person (“best friend just wrote on your wall/put a link on your wall/commented on your wall post” or “hot person from last Friday’s party just tagged you in a photo” or “super respected teacher from college just sent you a message”), you are going to make yourself more Facebook-active to prompt more responses. You will write on more walls, share more links, like more photos in order to increase your interaction level with the people you want to be receiving notifications from in return. And voilà: they respond, your notification count goes up. Which creates a hunger for MORE notifications, which requires more Facebook interaction… and the cycle of addiction has begun.
Of course this is just on Facebook, where ideally your friends are mostly people you’ve actually met in real life - but in the worlds of Twitter and blogging you are offered the expansion pack of receiving feedback from tens - hundreds - nay, thousands! of people who you have never met, but who have found you through common interests, hashtags, random surfing of the interwebs… if having a friend write on your wall makes you feel loved, how about having an artistically talented stranger reblog a picture you drew? That is affirmation that feels truly objective in a way that a friend’s compliments never quite can.
Image Credit: winarticles.net
The second kind of technology addiction is the addiction to the newsfeed, the twitter-feed, the RSS feed, what-have-you. The constant update of information. It’s not personalized in the way a notification is, so it doesn’t offer that thrill of popularity - yet it offers a never-ending source of entertainment, a glimpse into the world, with the addictiveness of voyeurism as you watch people’s lives unfold online (especially those on Facebook who really haven’t learned how to keep their relationships off the internet), or the self-aggrandizing thrill of LEARNING CLEVER NEW THINGS as you see the news unfold, or scientific developments be announced. It allows one to literally do nothing and yet be entertained, informed, shocked, amused (not to mention feel connected to friends & family!) as one new thing after another pops up; while at the same time creating a need to check in compulsively and constantly, lest even one single grain of information be missed. For the idle mind, this is a terrible trap: the newsfeed more often than not offers the intellectual stimulation of the infamous Snuggie infomercial, yet triggers our socio-technologically confused brains into thinking that we’re participating with the world by seeing the updates of friends/family/news/science/etc.
That’s certainly not to say that these updates don’t provide us with any information - I love the science tweets I subscribe to, and I follow quite a lot of them pretty ardently. And there have been any number of occasions when I’ve referenced a friend’s tweet back to them (is that still retweeting?) during an actual real-life conversation. But I also see just how addictive the presentation of this information is, with every single social networking site. It generates a need to constantly check for updates, a fear of missing crucial information, a willingness to scroll through backlogged news to ensure that nothing was skipped - all of which is facilitated and amplified to a frighteningly addictive level with smart devices.
And that’s kind of overwhelming to me. Especially because I have learned over and over again that I have an addictive personality: chocolate (now I aggressively crave it when I’m stressed), caffeine (I build a physical addiction within 3 days, so much so that I have painful withdrawal symptoms if I stop drinking it on the 4th day), certain routines… and now it’s that little buzz of excitement every time I open my email and see that I have a new Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/LinkedIn (wait… seriously? wow. that… that is sad)/Google+/ANYTHING update.
So, to make a reaaally long story short, I deleted my Facebook. And it feels, well, remarkably NOT like the end of the world. In fact, this morning when I woke up I read for an hour, and then I made breakfast for my mom and drew for a while, and then I got some important documents faxed (okay, so maybe I’m not ready for the 21st century yet… I’ll rewrite this article once I’ve sold the fax machine to an antiques yard for about 75¢), wrote until it was time to run some errands, and blah de blah blah, in short I did all the productive things that make me feel like a responsible grown-up who doesn’t piss around all day on the internet. And the very best part is that I got to feel brilliantly self-important and wildly alternative and ever-so-bohemian because now I get to be one of those weird fringe members of society who is NOT ON FACEBOOK.
Which, let’s be honest, is not quite as big an accomplishment as, oh, writing a novel/curing diseases/being an Olympic gold medalist/knowing how to do a cartwheel, and in all honesty I will probably have to get back on Facebook eventually to get in touch with that friend who said I could stay on the couch for free while I look for an apartment when I move back to San José… but for the time being, it feels pretty exciting, and pretty liberating, and pretty self-empowering. For someone who lacks the self-control to stop scrolling down through the damn newsfeed backlog, I feel that this was a heckuva good step in the right direction.
A variety of interesting articles on this topic courtesy of Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/technology-addiction
Wikihow’s 7 steps on defeating Facebook addiction. Mainly I just love this bit: “While there is currently no such thing as a medically blessed diagnosable ‘Facebook addiction’ or ‘Facebook addiction disorder’ that a health or medical professional could categorically state you’re suffering from, addictive behaviors have common threads that can lead to dysfunctional socializing and obsessive behaviors.” Clearly a risk!
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