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Comment by bigger_inside | Hacker News Reader

Have we collectively forgotten that Ivan Goldberg coined this term as a joke?

It was also an ironic commentary on the overreach of addiction metaphors to encompass everything that existing social structures, especially established structures of productivity and wealth extraction, found disruptive.

In that sense, the advent of "internet addiction" as a frame of reference was also part of the internet moral panic, which itself was just another iteration of all technology panics that have accompanied every shift in communication technologies, including the TV, movies, radio, novels, and book printing (which was the original fake news panic).

So, grain of salt.

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Strange reasoning. If I make a joke about holodeck addiction, then it can't be a real thing after the holodeck is invented? Or should every doctor refer to my joke?

The point is about psychiatric colonization of making sense of things that need not be framed that way, and where that framing is not only stigmatizing, but also defends "legacy" ways of doing things against existing social power structures.

Ivan Goldberg was criticizing that in the 90s, by making that joke: look, all the things they take as "symptoms of addiction", if you transfer that to what we, we realize that these need not be symptoms at all - just a form of passionate action in something." And boy, did that backfire.

Psychiatry has a long history of being a structurally conservative field that frames the action of people as "symptomatic" when it irritates existing hegemonic social expectations; there are great texts by Erving Goffman on how psychiatric framing defends our ideas of social normality against disruption, and tends to make it "just an individual disease problem". That completely ignores social change and, more importantly, social power structures in which suffering has much deeper contextual roots than just "this person is sick". (Goffman calls this an "illegitimized state of being "away", as opposed to legitimized ones like praying or working) [0].

Literature in game studies/critical education notes that declaring teenagers "addicted" because they use the little time school and homework leaves them - later at night - to game with friends rather than sleep stigmatizes their free use of time, their social connections outside of school, and their impudence of daring to try to decide over their time themselves rather than just submit to school-ordered ideal time management ideas.[1, but German].

Ivan Goldberg was trying to fight against the internet being stigmatized in the wake of yet another technology panic, and he did it after it was invented. And without intending to, he became the unofficial father of medicalizing it.

[0] Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places. [1] Michael Dellwing, Alessandro Tietz Pathologisierte Sozialität: „Spielsucht“ als institutionelle Verteidigung. In: Dellwing und Harbusch, Pathologisierte Gesellschaft? Weinheim: Beltz.

Usually isn't addiction also defined in terms of some harm to the person? Damaging relationships, getting fired, going broke, and so forth.

And having some guidance that Bob spending too much time on the internet is something serious and should follow an addiction recovery treatment plan is a net good thing (by a lot).

Those are all socially constructed to a degree, though.

When I was growing up in the 90s, my strong preference for online communication prevented me from making/doing some connections that were, at the time, considered mandatory: It was thought that there was no way I would meet a mate or land/keep a job if I spent my time online instead of partaking in a more 'acceptable' activity.

Such harm can also vary based on the person and their place in society. I'm female and one reason my time online was so disparaged was that it 'wasn't useful' and my interest in/passion for web development was seen as WRONG and a sign of possible sexual deviancy (I AM a lesbian...). I was also gently guided towards being a librarian because that was an 'acceptable' career for a smart girl who liked reading, and reading was an 'acceptable' odd pastime for a girl as opposed to my other obsessions (Tech! Building! Math!).

Some problems are socially constructed.

Some problems are socially constructed, yes. But in the study over half the respondents listed "severe" impairment across academic, relationship, financial, and occupational domains. Some of that is surely because their use butts up against social norms (e.g., if everyone is telling you that you spend too much time online, I'm guessing you'd be more likely to rate your anxiety about internet use as high), but I think it might be dangerous to handwave all behavioral disorders as benign because of social constructs. The definition of addition here is "impairment" not "non-normative".

If a person loses their house to a gambling addiction, it's probably not a good framework to just say they're just not living up to the socially constructed norm of having a roof over one's head.

My point is that the respondents may have been a self-selecting group due to a third factor, or they may just be people in general becoming more aware of this type of behavior. People who were internet addicts in the 90s are a skewed population.

My life is functionally impaired due to my homosexuality: Finding a partner is logistically difficult when your dating pool is, at best, 4% of that of others. This causes major financial and logistical impairments. Is my homosexuality the problem or is the problem a society which makes being single a difficulty? Likewise, 100 years ago, I would have spent my whole life blind. Now I live a normal life with very little in the way of visual accommodation. You cannot separate impairment from human society; humans are social animals.

Are the people in the article impaired because the internet is a problem, because of an external predisposition to addiction manifesting through internet use, or because society is impairing them?

It may be that the internet is a problem, but we aren't going to be able to answer that question unless we get rid of confounding variables.

>My point is that the respondents may have been a self-selecting group due to a third factor

The article addresses this:

"It is possible that those individuals classified as Dependent experienced an exaggerated set of negative consequences related to their Internet use compelling them to respond to advertisements for this study."

You seem to be losing focus on what the article is about, namely non-intoxicant addiction. "addiction can be defined as an impulse-control disorder which does not involve an intoxicant." If you were talking about a sexual addiction rather than a sexual preference, it would be an apt analogy.

To your point, yes, the context of impairment is being adaptive to the society in which one lives. The hermit living off the grid in Montana would probably be classified as maladaptive to modern society even if they think that society exhibits negative traits. That is a distinctly different claim as to whether that modern society exhibits certain favorable characteristics. This study was about the former point and made no claims to the latter.

The respondents characterized the Internet addiction as akin to cigarette cravings. I think it's possible (or even likely) there are confounding factors that drive this, but I think this study was asking a much simpler question of "Does Internet use display negative behavioral manifestations that align with other non-substance addictions, like gambling." To that point, either of those (Internet use or gambling) could be driven by societal factors.

no, rather that its funny how a term coined was so far from the reality of the situation just a few years down the timeline.

initially the internet was a bit of an enemy, and turns out they were right eveyone became internet addicted.

I hadn't heard this before, and was curious (especially since the paper being discussed is from 1996, 25 years ago) so I did a quick Google to see what was out there. This paper [0] describes how Goldberg first mentioned the idea on the PsyCom BBS (which he founded) in 1995, apparently as a response to his issues with the DSM IV, which had just been published the year before.

So, I learned that today - thanks, 'bigger_inside ;)

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776584/

But the context of the article is not disruption to the economy or power structure, but an impulse control disorder which does not involve an intoxicant and has negative impacts on one's life. If you can believe something like gambling is addictive, I think the term "addition" in the context of the study is apt.

"Internet addiction" doesn't strike me as a particularly unique expression, so I doubt he was the only one to come up with it. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of it before I first thought of myself as "computer-addicted" when I was a child, before I even knew what the Internet was (and then, soon enough, I would see myself as "Internet-addicted" as well).

It was talked about, but this was either the first or one of the first academic articles to mention it, if I recall correctly (I may not). Similar to how discussions about how to save things online bubbled up before IA was established or there were a lot of talks about what made a webpage valuable before Google and Page Rank came on to the scene. Lots of collective consciousness going on.

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