I am sure the vast majority of people don’t, while so many people feel completed to check something on the Internet.
Do you feel uncomfortable if you know in advance you won’t be able to use the library or the chess club for a whole day?
As someone who is not Gen-Z and remembers what life was before the internet, I can sure say that the internet beats any library I've ever spent time in.
The volume, diversity and ease of research ... all at your fingertips.
Why would anyone want to spend time trawling obscure library database systems only to find the library doesn't stock the right books or that someone has taken it on loan for an unknown period of time ?
Or worse .... microfiche. My god how that's a hellish storage medium I will not miss !
You're setting up a bit of strawman, I don't see anyone arguing the internet is inferior to the library, but that library usage (for example) doesn't trigger the dopamine release cycle in the way refreshing a frequently changing webpage does.
I think you're missing the point a little.
Back in the day, nobody who spent 8 hours a day 5 days a week in the library would be accused of "library addiction".
But suddenly, anyone who spends a long time on the internet just gets tarnished with a brush that says "internet addict" irrespective of what they do on the internet.
I suspect that the majority of people don't spend their time posting conspiracy theories on Twitter. Which is just why lumping everybody into one "the internet" category is more damaging than it is useful.
(Before anyone takes it too seriously, the references to long hours above were purely examples and not meant to be judged or interpreted !)
To make an analogy, lots of people are able to enjoy drinking alcohol without issue, but that doesn't disprove the existence of alcoholism.
You’re going to say “no no, friends are different.” That it’s actually healthy compared to let’s say, grinding WoW with friends from your guild. But it’s no different really. Why is it unhealthy if I spend hours playing WoW with friends but it’s healthy if I play football instead?
The dominant narrative on HN is that of course internet is an addiction. And that it’s pushed by evil companies that seek to profit off of it. Here’s a different perspective - the idea that it’s an addiction and that you’re powerless to solve it on your own is pushed by people who want you to turn to them to solve it. And pay for that privilege. In reality it’s not an addiction like heroin. You can beat it on your own without rehab or buying their 30 day detox program.
I'd argue that it might be (though I could be wrong on this, I haven't thought through all the possibilities) because the internet is new (or at least, the latest thing), whereas books are old. New thing bad, old thing good. For example, TV is seen as bad, but nowhere near as bad as the internet, but go back a few decades, and TV addiction is the hot issue to be solved. Perhaps if you go back far enough, you will find chess addiction or books addiction to be the hot issue.
To give a counter-analogy, at some point slot machines were new, and people might have lumped them in with the same category as chess: a fun game that you can play to pass the time. But eventually it was understood that slot machines have certain intrinsic properties which make them much harder to stop playing than chess for a lot of people, and we ended up regulating them because it was causing harm to society.
That’s where i disagree with your characterisation of the difference between chess and slot machines. It depend entirely on the person involved. Folks who can enjoy responsibly shouldn’t penalised because there are others who can’t.
Btw, if you disagree with my characterisation of sugar as addictive, you don’t need it to survive. It’s perfectly possible to live on protein and fat alone. The withdrawal from sugar is painful, but it’s doable.
Arguably we do have that with slot machines. If you want to go somewhere to gamble recreationally, you can book a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City. But we limit access because of the potential for harm. We don't let kids gamble, and I'm certain if every gas station was allowed to have a couple slot machines inside, we'd see a lot more people throwing their life savings away because their brains aren't wired in a way which lets them resist the compulsion.
There's a spectrum in terms of how addictive things are, and how much harm they do which we use to determine how much we as a society deem it is responsible to limit access to these things in order to protect people and society as a whole.
For instance, coffee is quite addictive, but it's not vary harmful, so access is pretty much free. Sugar is pretty addictive, but only slightly harmful, so it largely gets a pass. Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive and moderately harmful, so we keep them away from kids and tax them to make them more expensive and less attainable. Hard liquor is more harmful than beer and wine, so a lot of places restrict access to specific stores to make it harder to come by.
And it might be the case that some people can enjoy heroin responsibly, but it's so strongly addictive, and so incredibly harmful that we make it illegal to obtain it at all - even that means "penalising" the few folks who could potentially enjoy it responsibly.
I don't know where social media fits on that spectrum, but it is addictive, and it is at least worth considering how much harm is being done and whether we should think about regulating it.
Certainly we should restrict access to sugar, or at least tax it. But in most places, such policies are non starters.
But I think you're undercounting the harm caused by alcohol. There are diseases of abuse to consider, but the damage caused by alcohol is often more acute: traffic accidents and acts of violence are made much more likely by alcohol consumption.
Similarly, I think the harm caused by social media is also under-counted. In it's current state, it seems to cause an increase in the spread of misinformation, and a decrease in political stability and social cohesion.
That's quite a broad statement to make, as reading a PDF online is just as much a part of the internet as social media or anything else. Not every website has the same reward loop, not even close.
But I'll assume your talking specifically about social media. Whilst that's a bit of a different conversation, I would argue that books are no more "naturally compelling" than social media. Something is only compelling because it triggers a dopamine hit or whatever, the only thing I can think of which would "naturally" do that is eating, drinking and maybe sleeping. But something being unnaturally compelling isn't a bad thing.
> at some point slot machines were new
Of course I'm not saying anything that is new is not addictive and we just don't know it yet, some things are. My point is that nearly every big leap forwards in technology or entertainment is branded as addictive until the next thing comes along. A few of those things are indeed proven to be addictive, others are used many generations later as the "pure" form of entertainment
Your argument is a strawman argument. Calling something addictive, does not equate to saying that if you stop doing it, you get hurt. With this definition living /breathing/eating would be called addiction. That's not a very useful definition, and that's not the meaning of addiction.